Google Weighs in on Acer China Phone Debacle, But is Google Being Anti-Competitive?

Hands-on with the Acer A800 - But Google seems to have torpedoed its launch forever.

After a couple of days of silence from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which looked to have been implicated in the cancelled launch of an Acer phone in China, the search engine has finally released a statement. The phone was to be the Acer CloudMobileA800 running the Aliyun OS, a year-old mobile platform created by Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company.

[UPDATE: Scroll to bottom for remarks direct from Android man Andy Rubin].

Referencing its phone-maker partner, Google told the WSJ (paywall) earlier:

[Acer has] committed to building one Android platform and to not ship non-compatible Android devices. […] Compatibility is at the heart of the Android ecosystem and ensures a consistent experience for developers, manufacturers and consumers. Non-compatible versions of Android, like Aliyun, weaken the ecosystem.

So the assertion here is that Aliyun is a “non-compatible” version of Android; but Alibaba insists that it’s built from the ground up, based on Linux, and can run Android apps only by running them virtually and non-natively (a bit like in BlackBerry’s Playbook). Aliyun’s focus is on web apps. In reaction to Google’s words, Alibaba’s VP of international corporate affairs, John Spelich, said:

Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem so of course Aliyun OS is not and does not have to be compatible with Android. It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem.

Talking to TiA, John expanded on the ecosystem theme:

This is like saying that because they own the Googleplex in Mountain View, therefore anyone who builds in Mountain View is part of the Googleplex. Will someone please ask Google to define Android.

Previously, Google had told us that it couldn’t comment, while Acer emitted only a very vague apology a day after the last-minute cancellation of the dual Acer-Aliyun launch event in Shanghai. The Acer A800 was to have been the flagship phone for the Aliyun OS, and the first from a big-name hardware brand. Its two other phones are built by local partners K-Touch and Haier.

Anti-competitive?