“With MOTOBLUR we are differentiating the Android experience for consumers by delivering a unique mobile device experience designed around the way people interact today,”

Hooray! Motorola is differentiating the Android experience! Can you hear the screams of Android application ISVs? Oh yes – MOTOBLUR is a “skin” and doesn’t reimplement the virtual machine at the core of Android. Applications written to Google’s SDK will likely run. But if you want to really integrate your app with the Cliq and other MOTOBLUR phones, you’ll need to code up something special. And Motorola is gearing up to give you that rope, as Mr. Jha proudly announces in an interview with PC World:

“Over a period of time–we’re not there yet–we’ll allow the APIs to be available so people can develop many more applications than we can think of ourselves, but it’ll take us a little bit of time to mature ourselves to a place that we could open up APIs.”

And that’s just Motorola. HTC has an Android phone or two or three or four. LG and Samsung are getting in the race too. The Open Handset Alliance (what an ironic name!) has 47 members. Pretty soon Android is going to fragment into a thousand implementations. Goodie for Google, right? Android will beat that pesky iPhone through sheer diversity and market momentum!

Ah yes, the iPhone. Two versions! Black, and white. But only one API. Apple exerts absolute, iron-fisted control over their platform as the sole handset OEM, turning back all entreaties (except perhaps from China) to build variants specific to to carriers and geographies. By nearly eliminating the cost to port applications and handling deployment through a single mechanism – the iTunes App Store, Apple has dramatically improved the economics for application developers. With over 75,000 apps available, its been a huge success.

Android is already fragmenting, and fast. Google knows this, and knows it is a big obstacle to developers. It just makes it more expensive to create Android applications, and makes it likely that Android developers will target only a subset of the market. Chris DiBona, Google’s open source program manager said as much at this year’s OSCON Conference:

“We think it’s really important that we spend a lot of our time trying to reduce fragmentation from an the application stand point – so when you code the G1 it’ll also run on later platforms from Sony Ericsson and Motorola and all the rest – and that’s a huge challenge.”

Huge challenge indeed. Can Android succeed if it ends up with hundreds or thousands of different implementations each subtly different from the others, as Java ME sadly ended up? How much fun will it be for consumers to hear about the latest cool application for Android phones, visit the Android store, select their phone (which model is it again? the XV7845a or XV7845c?) and find out that the app doesn’t run or has unpalatable limitations on their handset?

The moral of the story: if you give your partners the ability to “differentiate” your platform, you had better understand the implications for developers and the end consumers of your software. Google has a lot of smart people and they’ve made the calculation that it is better to get Android on a zillion handsets across all the carriers, and that the inevitable price to pay is fragmentation, the OHA’s “non-fragmentation agreement” notwithstanding. It is a huge gamble, and history is not on their side. Is fragmentation inevitable? Is openness worth the price? How valuable is differentiation when it dramatically raises the cost of application development? Who does it benefit, anyway? Consumers? Will MOTOBLUR really help Motorola regain their mojo? What do you think?