While most of the talk today has been on the latest arrival from HTC, the HTC 10, one of the enduring news topics of the last couple of months is the next version of Android, which is currently entitled Android N. As is usually the case when a developer preview of the latest version of Android is released, Google has yet to decide on a final name (or at least yet to make publicly known their decision) and instead the latest version of Android goes by what is certain to be its first initial. In this case, N.
This in itself has led to wide speculation on what the next version of Android will be called and some of these suggestions that have been put forward so far include the likes of Nutella, Nougat, New York Cheesecake, among others. In fact, Hiroshi Lockheimer recently put out a blog post on Android N and hinted that the name may very well be Nutella. Another aspect which remains unknown is the actual Android version number with most assuming Android N will either follow as a decimal-based increase from Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) with Android N adopting Android 6.1 or adopting the greater level of separation, Android 7.0.
Well, if you ask Samsung it looks like they firmly believe the next version of Android will almost certainly be Android 7.0. The seemingly Samsung Android version number confirmation comes from a MultiWindow Release Note the company published back on March 28. While most of the release note is as you would expect, the one telling line reads as follows “This version has been released with Android N(7.0) compatibility”. Needless to say, this does highlight that at least for now, Samsung does consider Android N to be Android 7.0. Of course, this is not guaranteed to be the case, although it could be argued that if any OEM was going to know then Samsung would likely be that OEM. To many, the use of Android 7.0 will likely seem as the most logical step anyway as the update to N does seem to be one big enough to warrant a major numerical change. Either way though, it is likely we will know more of Android N in general once this year’s Google I/O conference kicks off next month.