UPDATED 10:55 EDT / JANUARY 04 2012

Google Beefs Up Patent Portfolio, Standardizes Android Requirements

Google has been beefing up their patent portfolio through acquisitions of entire companies or specific patents.  Last year, Google bought patents from IBM twice, the first batch in July followed by the second batch in August.  Google already bought over 2,000 patents from IBM, and they just bought another batch, which includes 187 patents and 36 patent applications.  And if the Motorola Mobility acquisition pushes forward, it will add another 17,000 patents to Google’s portfolio.

Google is a late bloomer when it comes to patent buys, and with a lot of companies like Oracle out to get them for patent infringement, patents is what Google needs in order to fend of these legal attacks.

Standardizing the Android experience

It’s not only patents that Google is focusing on, but they’re also trying to tighten their reign on the Android platform.  Google boasts that Android is an open platform, giving ODMs, OEMs and carrier partners the freedom to fork Android to whatever they want but now, Google is imposing that Android 4.0 devices should all have the Holo theme, standardizing the Android devices.

Since Android is an open platform, app developers are having a hard time creating apps since the Style and Themes of Anrdoid devices vary greatly.

The following excerpt is from the official blog post in Android Developers:

In Android 4.0, Holo is different. We’ve made the inclusion of the unmodified Holo theme family a compatibility requirement for devices running Android 4.0 and forward. If the device has Android Market it will have the Holo themes as they were originally designed.

This standardization goes for all of the public Holo widget styles as well. The Widget.Holo styles will be stable from device to device, safe for use as parent styles for incremental customizations within your app.

The Holo theme family in Android 4.0 consists of the themes Theme.Holo, Theme.Holo.Light, and Theme.Holo.Light.DarkActionBar. Examples of these themes in action are shown in the screenshots lining this post.

We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices. In fact we’ve gone further to make this even easier. In Android 4.0’s API (level 14) we’ve added a new public theme family to complement the Holo family introduced in Android 3.0: DeviceDefault. DeviceDefault themes are aliases for the device’s native look and feel. The DeviceDefault theme family and widget style family offer ways for developers to target the device’s native theme with all customizations intact.

Most Android developers will still want to support 2.x devices for a while as updates and new devices continue to roll out. This doesn’t stop you from taking advantage of newer themes on devices that support them though. Using Android’s resource system you can define themes for your app that are selected automatically based on the platform version of the device it’s running on.


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