After being told that Google understands the need for 3rd party access to Androids online services at Android Developer Session (Munich) in January 2008, I wonder about a statement in Ed Burnettes blog showing that Google is restricting access to the protocol API.

A Google employee I talked to felt the need to apologize for this. “We’re not holding it back for any nefarious purpose,” says Dick Wall on the Android team. “We’re simply not ready to publish the API that talks to the back end server.” This makes sense given Google’s extreme reluctance to be “stuck” with a poorly thought out API that they can’t support forever. This doesn’t preclude the company from opening up the source to those apps later.

In Munich we where told that Android developers would see a use case for 3rd party access, and start planning the interface for server-to-server XMPP. But after renaming and changing the XMPP services to “GTalk” it seems to me like Google does not plan to provide any open interface to their services.

Let’s hope it’s only a temporary thing until the API is stable…