[Android Apps and Games] EvaBrian:
Andy Rubin, the boss of all things smartphone at Google, can barely contain his excitement. A huge robot he designed has just arrived at Google's office.

The machine's sole function? To inscribe the logo of the Android operating system - a squat, R2-D2-like robot - into the foam of employees' coffees.

Considering its purpose, Scribbles, as its known, appears comically overengineered. But the machine itself is not what's important to Rubin. It's the robot's brains, its operating system. Just like the majority of mobile gadgets sold in the world today, it runs on Android, Google's open-source software.

In the third quarter of 2012, worldwide manufacturers - among them Apple, Samsung, HTC and Research in Motion - shipped 181.1 million smartphones, according to market analytics group IDC. Google's Android operating system was installed on 75 percent of them, says IDC; Apple's system, iOS, was on about 15 percent. That market share for Android was a 91 percent jump from the previous year's third quarter.

While proud of Android's increasing reach, Rubin tries to be modest. He points to bigger trends like faster wireless Internet, improved batteries and falling hardware costs for Android's success.

"But obviously, it's hypercompetitive," he said of the smartphone market. "It's an opportunity to make the world a better place, but, if you're selling stuff, make a profit - if you're good."

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon all try to keep customers within "walled gardens" or "ecosystems" of proprietary software. Operating systems, a form of ecosystem, provide a captive audience of customers for selling more software. The Windows operating system, for instance, is one of the main reasons Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint are today's dominant business software.

For Google, Android is the means by which it keeps its popular services, such as Maps, Drive and YouTube, in play in the increasingly mobile Internet environment of smartphones and tablets.

"We wanted to be sure those devices in your pocket were able to get to Google," said Hiroshi Lockheimer, Android's vice president of engineering. "In the end, we're an advertising company and we make money through ads."

Mobile future

Google bought Android in 2005 as it became clear that the future of computing was on mobile devices. About two years would pass before Apple's Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, but BlackBerry, among others, had already shown the world that pocket-sized computers were where we were all heading. Rubin has been at the helm of Android's meteoric rise since the company's founding in 2003, and saw the first Android phone sold in 2008.

He shies from the idea that he is responsible for the proliferation of the open-source software.

"Everything has a point of inception, but after that, it's everybody's," he said. "Rather than being 'the father of,' we consider ourselves 'the shepherd of.' "

Making Android "everybody's" has been perhaps the key to its proliferation. Anyone can download it, for free. For large gadget manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, building and maintaining a working operating system is a huge task. Google's strategy was to give Android away, in the hope that manufacturers would use it so they didn't have to build one themselves.

Apple, which declined interviews for this story, has followed an opposite strategy. Every device that runs on iOS - iPhones and iPads - are made by Apple. Apple does not license or give away iOS. This gives Apple full control, but reduces the number of opportunities it has to expand the use of the operating system.

Still, that anyone can install Android in a device - examples range from microwaves to robots - makes it hard to keep Google's ecosystem cohesive. It also calls into question the definition of Android's "market share."

Author:Caleb Garling