We hear the word “fragmentation” a lot around these parts. I mean the monthly platform numbers really show the fragmentation in Android, where nearly a quarter of Android devices are still running Gingerbread. Which is approaching 4 years old at this point. That’s just crazy. While we blame the OEMs, Google is also somewhat to blame. Their own wearable, Glass, is still running on Android 4.0.4. However, it appears that is about to change.
According to a post on the private Glass Community forum, a Googler explained that XE14 had missed their February deadline, but it has a good reason. It wasn’t ready to be released. Some may think that’s not a good reason, but it really is. It means that Google didn’t want to ship a half-baked update or a buggy update to Glass users. The post also stated that the team is enthusiastic about the rapid progress, and that they are announcing one great new feature in XE14, which is that Explorers will finally be leaving Ice Cream Sandwich behind and jumping straight to KitKat.
This update will bring plenty of improvements to Glass including Bluetooth Low Energy, OpenGL ES 3.0, better security, a richer API and much more. Although we don’t know if ART will be available on Glass or not, but it’s definitely exciting for Glass Explorers everywhere. The Googler also stated that while the Glass team wants to keep pushing out regular updates, monthly updates may be no more. Which is due to more ambitious goals which include the new Glass app store and building out the GDK, or the Glass Development Kit. It sounds like Glass users have a whole lot of goodness to look forward to in the next Glass update, which should be coming very soon, hopefully. We’ll have to cross our fingers for this one.