Report: Manufacturers "Abandoning" Android

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This is a highly dubious news report, but Bloomberg News is reporting that financial analysts in the mobile space and handset manufacturers are losing faith in both Google and Android’s future success. Despite perceived setbacks with Android, Google still says that mobile OS is going strong.

Earlier this year, Samsung announced it was going to develop its own mobile OS (Bada). In news that broke earlier this week, Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu and NEC are also teaming up to create another (yes, another) new mobile OS for phones.

Even Android loyalists at HTC are rumored to be interested in either Bada or the new unnamed mobile OS. Because some of those companies were apart of the Open Handset Alliance – some are seeing this as those manufacturers losing faith in Android. Verizon Wireless isn’t going to carry the Nexus One, further fueling speculation that Android is in trouble, according to Bloomberg (Verizon is still going to carry the HTC Droid Incredible – the idea that Bloomberg, a national financial news institute, missed this small fact is absolutely ‘incredible’ to me).

We’ve seen some manufacturers like Samsung and Motorola (in China) replace the Google Apps with Yahoo ones in Android. Bloomberg says that this is because these companies are literally afraid of giving Google more power. They quote Carl Howe, analyst, as saying:

Everybody is afraid of Google having too much power. I don’t think anyone wants to say, ‘In addition to 70 percent of the search traffic in the world, we’re going to give them a whole lot more business.’

In what seems like a ‘hit piece’ on Android, Bloomberg goes on to quote industry analysts that say that Android is buggy and incomplete. (They do point out the fragmentation that Android suffers from – which is a true negative on the open source OS). When Bloomberg talked to HTC and Motorola, both of those major manufacturers reaffirmed their commitment to Android. When Samsung was reached for comment by Bloomberg, they pointed out their upcoming Galaxy S superphone.

We did cover a story a few months ago here that said that several Wall Street financial firms were concerned that Android wasn’t making Google enough money – and they wanted Google to cut back on its ‘pet projects’. This could be some backlash from that.