Android's chief, Andy Rubin, has slammed reports on the internet about Google's "anti-fragmentation program" and defending the open source approach, whilst at the same time reiterating that Android Honeycomb features are coming to mobile phones.

“Recently, there’s been a lot of misinformation in the press about Android and Google’s role in supporting the ecosystem. I’m writing in the spirit of transparency and in an attempt to set the record straight,” starts out Rubin on a blog post on the Android Devs site.

Addressing the Google/non-Google issue, Rubin continues: “If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements. (After all, it would not be realistic to expect Google applications - or any applications for that matter - to operate flawlessly across incompatible devices)."

Rubin also points out that Google doesn’t believe in a “one size fits all” solution. “Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.”

That means manufacturers like HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG can customise the experience to differentiate their products from other manufacturers, as currently demonstrated on phones and the forthcoming TouchWiz UI on the Samsung Galaxy Tab is an example of this UI customisation over Honeycomb..

We've known for some time that Honeycomb and Gingerbread were going to collide, but Rubin has used the blog post to drop the juiciest nugget of all, confirming that Honeycomb features would be coming to mobile phones (like the leaked Music v3 app?)

“As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.”

So there you have it, you can guess what's coming up in your next phone update.

- Android 3.0 Honeycomb review