Reports state that Sony may in the future, be interested in creating custom Android ROMs for devices. More explicitly for their own devices probably, but creating custom ROMs for their own devices is still creating custom ROMs nonetheless. As of right now Sony has made it pretty clear that they don’t have any current plans to launch, create, or release any sort of custom AOSP based ROMs for their line of Xperia smartphones and tablets, but they also made no confirmation that they were completely dismissing the idea entirely. That leaves the open possibility of a custom ROM or ROMs somewhere in the future, even if it is distant.
In a blog post today on the Sony Mobile Developer Blog, Sony stated that it is not their current plan to release AOSP ROMs as some have been speculating on, but they also stated that the feedback over the idea of this happening is “interesting,” which at the very least shows that they might be interested too. As it stands right now, Sony’s involvement in creating custom ROMs is limited to providing the binaries and code to the developer community, who can then take the code and the binaries and run with it to create custom pieces of wondrous magic. Since these are just binaries and code they are solely a base of the build for developers to work from and Sony states that they aren’t fully fledged AOSP builds, just simply tools to make the developers work easier.
The latest Sony contribution to the initiative of the Android Open Source Project is a kernel that they’re working on together with a community of developers which they hope to make usable across many different Xperia devices. That isn’t exactly a fully built custom AOSP ROM, but it’s a start and could lead to bigger and better things from Sony in this particular category eventually. Basically what we’re saying, is that there is hope for the Sony device users out there that Sony will play a more major role in the AOSP ROM scene at some point, which would definitely be nice to see. Are there any Xperia device users out there that are hoping Sony will eventually create a custom AOSP ROM for use with a wide variety of Xperia devices?