Google announced the next version of Android, 4.3 Jelly Bean yesterday at the Breakfast With Sundar press event in San Francisco. We are already starting to see third-party ROMs being built on the Android 4.3 code base. CyanogenMod is probably the most popular custom Android ROM available, and the CyanogenMod team has announced that they are already hard at work on updating their Android base to the new version.
It usually doesn’t take long for the CM team to start work on an update to their ROM once Google releases a new version of Android. What we don’t know is when CyanogenMod will actually release their updated version. Information coming from the CM team tells us that they have updated their code from the AOSP repositories and merged that code to Github. They already have a “cm-10.2” branch, but have advised developers not to start building ROMs based on it because there are still issues to work out.
All AOSP repositories have been merged into our Github and branched to “cm-10.2”. Do not build it yet. There are a multitude of build errors that we are working through. We will put up another status update when everything has settled down.
No ETA.
That promise of another update release “when everything has settled down” is very tentative. The CyanogenMod team is very thorough, and will take the time to get things right before they start rolling out firmware updates for us. One of the things that the Android community has come to appreciate about CM is the quality of the ROMs they build.
Once things are somewhat stable, the CM team will begin rolling out nightly builds for users that want to stay on the bleeding edge of this ROM. CM Nightlies are somewhat stable, but will still contain bugs and issues. Things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and camera software can sometimes act strange. RC, or Release Candidate, builds will follow the nightly builds, and these RC releases are usually stable and completely fine to run as daily drivers. Once the Release Candidate builds are stable enough, the CyanogenMod team will release Milestone builds that are stable and fine to use for just about everyone. With this slight update from Android 4.2.2 to Android 4.3, there should be very few issues and updates should begin rolling out soon.