Those of us that own CDMA Nexus devices, we constantly complain about how long updates take way to long to make it’s way to our phone.Especially since it took Sprint about two and a half months for Sprint to send out Jelly Bean and Verizon took about three months to upgrade their Galaxy Nexus. After Android 4.1.2 hit, Google uploaded new factory images and binaries to its’ developer sites. Something new we saw was Google uploaded some Binaries for the Sprint Galaxy Nexus (Toroplus). Now they are archived, but Artem from Android Police spoke with JBQ about it and it should say “experimental”. So it looks like this is the first step to making the Sprint Galaxy Nexus an AOSP device like the Nexus S 4G on Sprint.
Here’s the full conversation between Artem Russakovskii (Android Police) and Jean Baptiste-Queru (Android Open Source Project):
Artem: +Jean-Baptiste Queru Does the presence of Galaxy Nexus (Sprint) 4.1.2 blobs at https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/drivers indicate a change in its Nexus status? Or at least a good direction for getting it supported by AOSP? It does say “archive” but…
JBQ: Oops, it should read “experimental”, my mistake. It’s not really working yet in AOSP. No change about anything else related to that phone.
Artem: Hmm. But before the 4.1.2 release, they weren’t published at all, were they (for Sprint)? Last time binaries said “experimental,” it was the Verizon Galaxy Nexus, which everyone read as “it’s back to being supported by AOSP” (and it kind of was). So, what did change that prompted posting the drivers this time around?
JBQ: It’s somewhat similar to the way toro was back then, not really working quite yet. The difference is that toroplus is limited by technical issues, whereas toro was limited by non-technical issues. This is just the result of a lot of work. Not a fundamental change, just taking down many hurdles that were preventing me from trying to support that device in AOSP.
And, yes, I confirm that those files were published for the first time a few days ago. We only got all the bits in place sometime last week.
Artem: So what’s left to do to get it to the Verizon GN level of support? This is pretty exciting. Would you call this newsworthy, considering the progress from 0 to all those binaries? I sure would, but I’m trying to understand the full picture.
JBQ: There are still bugs in the network stack, which crashes at boot and doesn’t actually connect to Sprint’s network. I don’t think I’d call this newsworthy yet. In my mind, it’ll be newsworthy if we can get those bugs fixed. While there’s some progress behind the curtain, for all practical purposes we went from “doesn’t work” to “doesn’t work”.
So it looks like Toroplus will get some AOSP support soon, and join Crespo4G (Nexus S 4G – Sprint).