At Google's official Android discussion forum, developer Nicolas Gramlich has published an open letter to the company detailing his dismay at the way the company is keeping Android development updates to itself.
It's been almost five months since a major update has been released for the open source development community to play with, and those waiting to deliver are getting frustrated.
Gramlich writes: "In order not to lose many highly encouraged developers, I think its [sic] time to release some news about the development process of the SDK. Maybe let us know why we have to live with these long cycles."
Driving people away
The other aspect upsetting those sitting in front of their computers trying to use the old SDK, is the lack of hardware to test things on.
The first phone to run Google Android is likely to come from HTC at the end of the year, though persistent rumours of delays are further frustrating developers.
In the end, it's likely to only do one thing: drive people to another platform, as one post from user 'Hong' explains:
"I'm afraid (at the same time excited) that by the time the next Android SDK
is released (close to EOY 2008 I guess), many developers here have already
released software on the iPhone platform, a platform with 20+ million users
versus ZERO user install base for Android.
"It's not a hard decision to make after all. Hopefully someone wakes up sooner than later."
However, a new SDK has been developed, it's just that it's a closely guarded secret. Only the VIP developers have got their hands on it according to The Register, those that got to the Android Developer Challenge finals.
Whether showing it only to the cream of development talent is a good thing, only Google knows. And it's not sharing the info yet (we know, we searched for it).
