Andy Rubin: ‘I Don’t Think There Should Be Apps Specific to a Tablet’

Joanna Stern:

“I don’t think there should be apps specific to a tablet,” [Rubin] said. He also added that “if someone makes an [Ice Cream Sandwich] app it’s going to run on phones and it’s going to run on tablets.” Now, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think there shouldn’t be apps optimized for larger screens, it just means that ICS will continue to work like Honeycomb, with a single app scaling differently to different screen sizes. (He referenced staying away from the Apple iPad / iPhone division in the App Store.) That makes sense to us, but Rubin didn’t seem to be too concerned with those large screened apps: “the Twitter phone app works fine on a tablet.” Indeed it does, but the experience is nowhere near as good as the one tweaked to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen.

In other words, Google’s grand-unification strategy for Android 4 is basically to treat tablets as big phones. Given how big Android phones are getting, maybe that’s the right strategy.

★ Wednesday, 19 October 2011