Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has decided to change terms of its long-term association with Oracle under which it used to implement latter’s JAVA APIs in its Android platform. As per the reports, the next version of Android will have OpenJDK in place of JAVA APIs in the future. The OpenJDK is owned by Oracle and is an open source version of Java Development Kit.
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The news was first revealed in November when a “mysterious Android codebase commit” was submitted to leading social media tech platform Hacker News. Later, Google confirmed that the next version of Android i.e. Android N will completely rely on the OpenJDK rather than JAVA APIs.
A Google spokesperson said that Android is an open-source platform and can’t work without the collaborative efforts made by open-source community. Google seeks to help developers in building services and apps; therefore, it has decided to move from Java language libraries in Android’s next version to an OpenJDK-based approach. By this way, Google will create a common code base for the developers.
In the past, Google worked with OpenJDK community on several occasions and contributed towards its development, and going forward it intends to increase its efforts by a great margin.
There are two types of JAVA libraries through which Android lends its support in developing apps in the JAVA programming language – code developed by Google and APIs. Oracle implements these libraries in two different ways: The open source OpenJDK version and the proprietary JDK version. By announcing that Android will go hand in hand with OpenJDK, Google has unveiled its intentions to share its implementation code.
Google hopes that this change will prove to be helpful for developers and earn praise from them in the future. Only time will tell if things proceed the way Google hopes and get positive customer response or take a toll on its market image globally.
