Huawei Mate 9 & P10 Kernel Sources Get Open Sourced

The Huawei Mate 9 and P10, the company’s current high-end flagship smartphones, finally have had their kernel sources open sourced. Since Android is open sourced, and it uses the Linux kernel, any changes to that kernel are supposed to be made public, under the GNU General Public License. Now some companies don’t abide by that, but it’s nice to see others do abide by that licensing. Typically, manufacturers do take their sweet time in releasing the source code, and that’s not surprising. As this code can be seen as proprietary, so many manufacturers don’t want to give out their changes to their competitors.

With the source code being open sourced, and now available, for the Huawei Mate 9 and the Huawei P10, it’s not going to change much of anything for most owners of these two smartphones. What will change, however, is the development for both smartphones. With the kernel sources now being available, there should be better and more stable custom ROMs available for both devices, as well as better custom kernels available as well. So unless you are into rooting and ROMing your Huawei Mate 9 or P10, you likely won’t notice any differences at all with this news. If you are a developer, however, you can download the source code and tinker around with it.

The Huawei Mate 9 was unveiled last fall in Germany. It’s the fifth-generation Huawei Mate (formerly the Ascend Mate) smartphone, and it’s perhaps the best one yet. It sports dual cameras on the backside, as you’d expect with the latest generation of Huawei’s devices. It also has top-of-the-line specs inside and has an all-metal build. The Huawei P10 on the other hand, was announced at Mobile World Congress just a few weeks ago, and while it’s still a high-end device, it’s not as large as the Mate 9. It has a glass and metal build, which seems to be a popular route to go these days. And it does have a dual-camera setup as well, in fact it’s the same setup as what Huawei’s Mate 9 has, but they are horizontal instead of vertical. You can download the kernel source for either device using the links below.