Google Says Facebook Home Demonstrates Android's Openness, Framing Apple As Restrictive

Google’s statement on Facebook’s introduction of “Home” was short and sweet, but very telling, so let’s dissect it a little bit. As we noted earlier, Facebook went with Android first because of its flexibility, basically it’s easy to customize. Other platforms, not so much. Zuckerberg even mentioned that Windows Phone might be a bit easier to work with, calling it out as “somewhere in the middle” of Android and iOS. Here’s what Google said to us a little while ago: The Android platform has spurred the development of hundreds of different types of devices. This latest device demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular. You’ll notice that the first thing that the company says is that there are “hundreds” of different types of devices running its mobile operating system. In the past, that’s been seen as a bad thing, due to fragmentation. Here, Google is clearly positioning this as an advantage, that is has more choices for consumers than say, Apple has. Secondly, “this latest device,” being the HTC First, which is pre-installed with Facebook Home, demonstrates flexibility. There’s that word again. Clearly, Google is firing a rocket at its competitor Apple, which is notoriously very stiff when it comes to customization. In Apple’s mind, its users don’t know what they want to see until it shows it to them. By letting a company like Facebook take over the first experience a user has when it wakes up their phone, they are giving away pretty much everything. Again, Google points this out as a competitive advantage. In an extended version of the statement to VentureBeat, Google made sure to pump up its own products at the same time: And it?s a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play ? the heart of the Android ecosystem ? along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search, and Google Maps. In this added bit, Google makes sure to bring the attention back to its baked-in Android services, like search, email and maps. Is that Google getting a little bit jealous of all of the fuss over Facebook? Not at all. These companies are competitive in the sense that they’re both after eyeballs, but when it comes to social interactions, they couldn’t be more different. Forget the Google+ argument here, it wasn’t built to be a competitor to Facebook. Google owns search and email

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