Andy Rubin, the former VP for Mobile at Google stepped down from his position as the lead of the Android team at Google. He was replaced by Sundar Pichai who is now the lead of both Mobile and Chrome at Google, a huge role.

This shows that Google is moving towards a more web-centric strategy in their products – they are a web company, with Search at their heart – and will likely combine Chrome and Android in the future to align with the low-end Firefox OS which uses an entirely Web tech-based interface. It will also be more similar to the web-focussed (not -based) ‘Ubuntu for Phones’ showing a general trend in mobile technology. Apple, too, is seen to be invested in iCloud, however their heavy dependence on the App Store and the power they have in the native app space makes it hard to see them approaching the Web and mobile in the same as these other companies. Apple is a hardware company, not a service company, so this is only to be expected.

Oh, and you can read The Verge’s in-detail editorial covering Rubin’s replacement and history at Google – he started off at the original Android before Google acquired it. This quote from the piece is pretty interesting:

Actually, Android is Andy Rubin — Co-workers at Apple gave him the nickname back in 1989.

It was pretty big news…

P.S. I wrote this thing about the Internet and the future today.