So, Google’s been accused of throwing its weight around by hectoring handset manufacturers and keeping their OS out of the open-source community. Andy Rubin—VP of Engineering at Google—recently came around to denying the above accusations from Bloomberg Businessweek in a recent blog post. It took him a week, he suggests, because he didn’t feel like the position being taken in the article reflected the reality of the situation.

In fact, he’s painted the entire thing as FUD (or in the industry, “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt”). He has pointed out that the Android community has grown exponentially since its introduction in 2008 and that their mission has changed very little,

We don’t believe in a “one size fits all” solution. The Android platform has already spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices – many of which were not originally contemplated when the platform was first created. What amazes me is that the even though the quantity and breadth of Android products being built has grown tremendously, it’s clear that quality and consistency continue to be top priorities. Miraculously, we are seeing the platform take on new use cases, features and form factors as it’s being introduced in new categories and regions while still remaining consistent and compatible for third party applications.

These accusations come on the strange cusp of a lot of technology news mud-slinging about the very problem that this supposed bullying is supposed to solve. Google has been touted repeatedly as having a “fragmentation problem” and now they’re being accused to putting the screws to manufacturers for grabbing and innovating too much? It seems like a nonsensical that Google wouldn’t impress some sort of core standards (which is not in any way “bullying”) in order to keep their devices on a similar path.

In an article published on CNet, “Alleged crackdown shows Android politicking” Stephen Shankland does an excellent job of displaying how rumors of the crackdown turned into full-blown press. He argues that Google has every reason to start discouraging phone makers from straying too far from the original standards and at the same time, those phone makers are pushing back, vying for leverage against a powerful partner. This sort of tug-of-war is going to generate a lot of waves. He points out that a great deal of the landscape is marred by phones that deviate a bit too far from vanilla Android—often managing the experience for consumers—which in turn may drive some of them away.

With their newest developments, Google looks to be trying to address the part of fragmentation that hits customers of Android the hardest—the time that all consumers get updates and security fixes to their phones—and they’re doing that through Ice Cream. This doesn’t necessarily mean that suddenly handset makers will be forced to use one particular UI; but it does mean that tablets and handsets will move together on the underlying technology.

The next accusation, of course, is the common one of complaining that Android isn’t open source. This one has always come across to me as a weird sort of black-and-white fallacy, pretending that there’s only two schools of thought when it comes to code and innovation: totally open and totally closed. Anyone who manufactures code and spins development cycles that will run closely tied to commercial hardware knows it’s a lot more nuanced than that.

As Andy Rubin points out in his blog post,

Finally, we continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.

No commercial product creator, even those who open their code to the open source community, is obliged to give them everything when it’s not ready for release. Open source represents a spectrum of transparency and availability to the community and this has been a raging debate for many, many years and the fact that it has not resolved with any litmus test that discards partial proprietary probably means it’s here to stay.

Google Android may not fully engage the open-source community, but that’s not the only way to be open source. Certainly, especially with the extreme competition with Apple iOS devices, Google is far more “open source” than iOS in this vein, which has always existed in its own proprietary bubble.

All these qualifications flying about strategy and market approach, Android does still hold almost 29% of the mobile market, and we’re still seeing a lot of reasons why we might expect the market juggernauts to change course. After all, Android is pushing the three-year mark and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.