What does Hugo Barra think of Steve Jobs's allegations of Android 'imitating' Apple's phone operating system?Has Android imitated features from Apple's iOS? It's not a issue that Google's leading managers for the Android operating system want to get mixed up in.
Hugo Barra, product management director for Android at Google, persisted in London on Tuesday that he hadn't listen to the disclosures that appeared last Friday from the Steve Jobs biography: that the late Apple chief executive "vowed to tear down Android", and was so angry at what he saw as replicating applied in Android 2.1 on HTC phones released in January 2010 that he called for Eric Schmidt to a meeting in March and said he required it closed.
"He said that?" said Barra, sounding overwhelmed. He said that he had been journeying and had not listened to the stories.
When given explanations about them – and inquired whether he would articulate that any features in the new version of Android, such as the two-line preview of emails in the Gmail app (found in Apple's iPhone email program since 2007), or the "speedy reply" buttons at the bottom of the email app (about alike in order and aim to those in Apple's iPhone email program), or the stipulation of a shortcut to the camera from the phone's lock screen (first seen in iOS 5 appetizers in June), or the an additional elements further to the Notifications bar in Android – were duplicating iOS, he responded: "I'm not going to find into this."
Barra refused to response when asked Google had applied a "element freeze" on Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android which will be put into practice in phones due for delivery from next month. A "element freeze" is the point at which no latest aspects are further to code, so that it can be experienced and refined: "That's an inner matter," he said.
Barra joined Google's Android attempt in December 2010, and was main in the making of Ice Cream Sandwich, which is version 4.0 of Android. He said that a main purpose was to enhance the client experience of Android, and that work on figuring out what to do and how, if at all, to alter it had built in broad-scale testing with both presented users of Android and non-users to discover what they found harder or wanted to observe.
"A numbers of the coding [of Ice Cream Sandwich] was simultaneous with that of Honeycomb [which was released to makers in February 2011]", Barra said. The "gold master" version of Ice Cream Sandwich was formed in time for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus last week in Hong Kong.
