We all had a feeling that something like this was going to happen when the Nexus devices hit the Play Store for order earlier this morning on the West Coast. Every time there are new devices there are a whole lot more people looking forward to when the code hits the AOSP, this might mean that the latest and freatest version of Android may well be coming their way soon. When code hits the Android Open Source Project it’s perhaps the most telling sign that a new version of Android is here. This is what custom ROMs and even updates from manufacturers will be built upon.
This time around there are some telling surprises as the code is on its way to the AOSP, for instance, it’s said that the Nexus 10 is Google’s most open flagship yet with little proprietary binaries in there at all, Jean-Baptiste Queru, the man behind the AOSP has noted that “the only proprietary binaries besides the GPU libraries are firmware files that get loaded into the various peripheral chips”. Something that is pretty important when it comes to the AOSP as not everything can be supported due to licensing but it’s good to see that some hardware is more open than ever.
The Nexus 7 3G however, is not a build target at this time due to some licensing issues and the Nexus 4 isn’t yet up to scratch either but, these are new devices and I’m sure whatever problems there are will be fixed real soon. We doubly hope so when it comes to the Nexus 4 because let’s not pretend the lucky few that have one coming to them are going to want to do all sorts of things to this phone.
There is some sad news however as there is no support for the Nexus S and the Motorola XOOM instead JBQ says that these devices should use “4.1.2 instead”. Is this the end for the XOOM and the Nexus S? I certainly hope not as even though the Nexus S is really quite old, it still runs 4.1 just fine and the hardware inside the XOOM will definitely handle 4.2 amiably. I wonder whether or not we will hear anything official from Google on this any time soon?
So there we have it folks, it’s only a matter of a couple weeks before your favorite ROM builders start work on the new platform.