There has been quite a few rumors surrounding Andromeda, Google’s fabled new OS that some were hoping would show up in some form or another at Google’s October 4th event. While there are nothing more than bits and pieces of detail about Andromeda floating around, none of it confirmed, here and there some new information tends to trickle in that can be added to everything else that’s already been rumored and provide a little more of an idea of what Google’s plans are for Andromeda, as well as the future of Android. The latest piece of information suggests that two major (also unnamed) OEMs now have access to Dev Kits for Andromeda, and that the plan is for there to be devices starting to go on sale towards the end of Q3 or the end of Q4 of next year.
According to 9To5Google who spoke to the source providing the new rumored information, “next year” was not explicitly mentioned, but seeing as Q3 2016 is already over, and Google hasn’t even announced anything to do with Andromeda yet, next year seems like the most plausible scenario. While neither of the two-rumored OEMs have been named, it’s possible that one of these manufacturers could be Huawei, who has been rumored as the brand that will launch Andromeda via a new tablet.
Alongside dev kits being available to a couple of manufacturers and a planned launch for devices towards the end of next year, the rumor mentions that Android 8.0 is already being merged with Andromeda, which builds just a little bit on the rumor that Google may have plans to move towards Andromeda as their mobile OS by incorporating Android into it. How accurate these rumors are is still very unclear, of course, as is every other detail about the project so far. How a merging of the two operating systems would work is not known, nor what benefits Andromeda will provide to users, but there is at least one new rumored feature, said to allow for cross-device syncing of notifications from the Google account that is used to sign into each device. Building on cross-device syncing, uses may be able to expect some apps to act in the same way, such as Allo with messages. Nothing is official as of yet, but the speculation it seems is that Google is leading up to a Fall 2017 reveal for their new hardware and software combinations with Andromeda as the focus.