Taking advantage of freedom of speech gifted by his new found employer, former Sun Microsystems web technologies director Tim Bray has taken to his blog to give a candid account of his new role as Google Developer Advocate - and that means talking down the firm's main mobile rival, Apple.

Speaking in an entry detailing his new role at Google - which, he says, will mainly focus on working with Android - Bray takes time to dismiss the notion that taking on iPhone is a fruitless task.

All-conquering Apple

Indeed, according to Bray Apple's current direction is suffocating the companies and consumers that have iPhone at the centre of their activities.

"The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what," Bray says in the blog entry.

"It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it. I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient."

Keen to control

For a company many hold up as an alternative to the huge corporations that used to dominate consumer software, Bray suggests Apple is very close to turning into the kind of company it originally sought to unseat.

"Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other. I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it."

Though the words are Bray's own and not Google's, he claims that the company asked to see an advance draft of the piece "for coordinating messaging", but "didn't suggest any changes".

Android's assault

Bray says his new role at Google - which, he claims, has been on the cards "repeatedly over the years" - will revolve around him pushing Android to developers who have either tried and given up on the OS, or are yet to take the plunge.

He adds, "The reason I'm here is mostly Android, which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the net can sustain just now.

"The mobile space has had a huge impact in the emerging economies of the less-developed world and I think that's just getting started. I want to be part of that story and Android seems like the right software platform for it."
Mobile Entertainment