Google used their Android 2.2 Froyo launch today to bring the fight squarely to Apple and Steve Jobs, saying in essence they created Android because they feared a future where one man (Steve Jobs) and one company (Apple) controlled the mobile space.

Now I’m not going to call that cake a lie (because it’s technically a chilled desert this time), but let’s be clear — Google created Android because they feared any future where any company — be it Apple, Microsoft, or some unforeseen upstart to lock them out of their cash-cow, advertising. (FYI – That’s why Microsoft built Bing and why Apple is making iAds: so that one company — Google — doesn’t control online advertising).

That’s smart business. But to claim any form of benevolence or greater-than-thou community spirit is disingenuous-to-insulting. Google, like Apple or Adobe is as open as suits them and as proprietary as their revenue generation demands. As much as Apple controls the iPhone, as much as Adobe owns Flash, Google’s crown jewel of advertising is theirs and theirs alone. AdWords isn’t open source.

So they can make fun of Apple curating the App Store, or that at any one time any of a dozen high-end Androids can perform certain tasks well, or that they can put Flash on a phone but not Silverlight or ActiveX, or poke at iTunes not yet being cloud-based. But they can’t and don’t talk about the Android Market’s enormous selection of keyboards, fess up to the battery problems as a platform issue, come to grips with the inconsistent user experience, deal with the reality that is recent devices have unclear and fragmented OS paths, and acknowledge those users burned severely by the still immature cloud who want local solution options as well.

Google pushed out a lot of tech this week. A scary, wonderful, crazy, beautiful amount of tech I don’t think we’ve seen in such volume in such a short time before. It will be challenge enough for them to realize most of it, much less all of it. It’s just plain gutsy.

Even gutsier was poking Apple before the much better spoken Steve Jobs takes the much bigger stage at WWDC 2010 to announce the much more attention getting 4th generation iPhone.

[Android Central]

Lee Williams, executive director at Symbian, sits down with GigaOM‘s Om Malik, and gets candid — really candid — about Apple and Google:

“Android is building a perfect storm of fragmentation. I don’t view Apple as evil, just greedy. Google … Come on.”

He claims his opinion is informed by his conversations with large carriers who complain that they have to provide Apple App Store apps to iPhone users yet derive no income from them (we’d point out they made money off the data plans — dumb pipes!), and that Google is taking away their customer interface, “cookie-ing” them (tracking their online activities) via proprietary apps obscured in lip service to “openness” and using that to feed their advertising business.

When asked why companies like HTC, if they know Google is “evil”, aren’t investing in Symbian instead, Williams advises Om to “wait and see”, and thinks those manufacturers might be interested in “very open systems.”

While offering no advice to Apple, he does invite Google to join the Symbian foundation so they can have a voice in that open system. Somehow we doubt he’ll see them take up that offer any time soon.

Harsh words for competitors, but also strangely refreshing to see on camera. As to the iPhone, is the carrier beef legitimate? Should they be getting a cut of App Store profits, or should they be happy with the huge increase in data revenue the iPhone is already bringing them?

Apple decides which apps get approved for the iPhone/iPod touch App Store, provides little to no transparency on the process, prevents certain things like turn-by-turn GPS outright in the SDK agreement, and — though they’ve yet to use them — maintains black lists for GPS and malware that could remove any LocationServices or entire applications from iPhones everywhere. For this, and more, Apple has earned quite a bit of criticism — and rightly so in many cases.

What if Apple went further, however. They sell officially unlocked iPhones in several regions, like Hong Kong. They also have a program that grants developers tethering abilities for testing. What if, one day, people with unlocked or developer iPhones woke up to find the Paid section of the App Store gone. What would the community reaction be? What should it be?

Google, whose “don’t be evil” motto has been downgraded by management in recent years, is lauded for the openness of their Android Market (even though they’re known to have a kill switch of their ownl — to do otherwise would be irresponsible), yet our friends over at Android Central woke to find themselves in just such a situation this week. Paid apps. Gone.

We’re told it’s because of piracy concerns, that Google thinks developer units of the G1 make it easier for people to steal paid apps. Jeffdc5 on Twitter let us know developer G1 handsets could store apps on the SD memory card in addition to the on-device memory of the regular units, which could make them more pirate-able. However, we’ve seen that the iPhone — with no external memory — can have apps pirated as well, so is that readon enough? It smacks of the same “treat your customers as thieves” thinking that created DRM music, Microsoft Genuine Advantage, Sony rootkits, and Adobe invading our boot sectors…

Apple has already removed DRM from iTunes music, and has now removed product keys from boxed versions of iLife 09 and iWork 09 as well. It seems to be working out none too badly for them.

Openness is definitely A Good Thing. Maybe trust in your user base should be as well?