Google’s got an Android problem, and a big one. And it’s a problem Google shares with us fans of Google content-delivering services, such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ and others.

That problems is that companies like Amazon and Facebook increasingly hijack Android to divert user attention away from Google services and toward their own or their partners’.

This post isn’t about the problem, which I’ve written about extensively here, here and here. It’s about the solution.

Still, let’s understand both the problem and the solution.

Facebook invited the media to “Come See Our New Home On Android” on April 4.

The most likely prediction for Facebook’s project, code-named “Buffy,” is that it’s a modified, Facebook-centric version of Android on an HTC handset with a promise of other handsets — some insiders call it an “application layer.”

The dark horse contender is a Facebook-branded phone.

That’s great, right? Facebook has now friended Google and will join the growing family of Android-loving companies. Uh, right?

Wrong. Facebook is joining the club of Google’s enemies who are using Android to take business away from Google.

Google is getting closer to releasing Google Glass into the market. And we learned this week that Google’s Android team is working on a smartwatch. 

Both these products are examples of Android-based wearable computing devices.

A fresh new religious war has broken out on the social networks about whether the watch is better than the glasses, or whether smartphones are better than both the glasses and the watch. “Why would I wear an Android smartwatch when I have an Android phone in my pocket that’s much better?”

These arguments demonstrate that most people don’t get this technology at all.

Google reassigned former Android chief Andy Rubin and put the head of the Chrome group, Sundar Pichai, in charge of Android.

A lot of people think this means Android and the Chrome OS will be merged into a single operating system.

I think that’s crazy talk.

We simply couldn’t get a Turkish SIM card to work on my Nexus. While trying to make it across Istanbul during a storm, we had to ask our taxi driver to use his phone to get directions. It would have been nice to just use Google Maps on my own Android phone.

An unpleasant phone call with AT&T yesterday highlighted for me what I consider to be the biggest unsolved problem in mobility: using a smartphone in a foreign country.

Phone calls are expensive. Mobile broadband is either expensive, hard to find or both. And even WiFi can suck.

According to the UN’s World Health Organization, the human race takes more than 900 million trips to countries other than their own each year. It’s a huge problem affecting a very large number of people.

I’m a digital nomad and I live abroad. In the past nine months, I’ve lived in Greece, Turkey, Kenya and Spain. Believe me: Getting connected abroad is harder, more expensive and less satisfying than it should be.