Android fragmentation has been in the news again lately, prompting Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of engineering, to pen a Wednesday blog post in which he defended Android and insisted that the company remains committed to developing an open platform.

Android fragmentation has been in the news again lately, prompting Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of engineering, to pen a Wednesday blog post in which he defended Android and insisted that the company remains committed to developing an open platform.

Reports to the contrary are "misinformation," Rubin wrote.

"We don't believe in a 'one size fits all' solution," he continued. "Miraculously, we are seeing the platform take on new use cases, features and form factors as it's being introduced in new categories and regions while still remaining consistent and compatible for third party applications."

Rubin's comments come after a this week found that 55 percent of Android developers find OS fragmentation to be a meaningful or huge problem. But Android isn't exactly suffering. This week also saw the release of reports that said Android-based smartphones of the U.S. market, and could command nearly half of worldwide smartphone OS market share by the end of 2012.

The ability to customize the Android OS "enables device makers to support the unique and differentiating functionality of their products," Rubin wrote.

Google has basic compatability requirements if handset makers want to include Google apps on their devices, and Google has an anti-fragmentation program in place, but "there are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture," he said.

Google made headlines last month when it said it would to smaller phone manufacturers for an undisclosed period of time. Google said that was designed for tablets, not phones, and that it had more work to do before Honeycomb was released in an open-source format.

PCMag mobile analyst that forces the question of whether anyone can create a great open-source mobile UI.

On Wednesday, Rubin denied that that announcement represents a change in strategy, and insisted that Google "remain[s] firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types."

"As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones," he wrote. "As soon as this work is completed, we'll publish the code."

For PCMag Editor Lance Ulanoff's take on the OS, see .