Jay Eye Sea

This article was originally published on Google Blogoscoped as Google for iPhone: Android’s beta-test platform?

I’ve been surprised by how rapidly Google has been redesigning its mobile services to support the iPhone: In less than 6 months, Google has created custom iPhone interfaces for all its key services. But it may have an ulterior motive.The services which have been customised for iPhone include:

In addition Google have developed a specific application to allow YouTube videos to be streamed to the iPhone - to get around the absence of Flash on the iPhone.

It’s understandable how the iPhone platform has grabbed the imagination of Google’s employees - it’s the internet in your pocket, with a clean, intuitive interface, and with Eric Schmidt* at the helm it can’t be hard to convince your manager to let you spend your 20% on iPhone related applications. In fact, iPhone-mania at Google has even got Europe’s favorite long-tail cartographer Ed Parsons dumping his almost new Nokia N95 for an iPhone - even though it doesn’t have GPS!

But what if there was another reason. Yes, Google are gaining consideration experience developing its mobile services for its new platform - Android. But look a little closer. The iPhone and Android share the common foundations in the open source web browser engine WebKit.

WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.

And on Google’s Android website:

[Android's] integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine.

Hence, what we may be actually looking at is Google’s mobile services which will be available on Android from its launch, effectively putting iPhone users through the pain of finding the flaws.

In addition, Flash for the iPhone has not been forthcoming, and there are also questions around whether Android will support Flash - which is not that surprising given Google’s limited use of Flash on its own websites**.

So for those who have looked jealously at the new interfaces being developed for iPhone, have a little patience, because I think what you are looking at is Google’s services for Android.

Jon Bradford and Ian Leader

*Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board of directors, and he’s also using an iPhone himself.

**Services like Google Finance or Google Analytics are among the somewhat rare exceptions of Google using Flash.

UPDATE:  The importance of the Webkit browser has been subsequently identifiedby the RWW - How Google Plans to Win the Wild West of the Mobile Web.