Samsung on Thursday released its kernel sources for the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus, with the move being meant to support independent developers looking to make custom Android implementations for the company’s latest pair of flagships. The South Korean original equipment manufacturer released the sources of all four variants of its new offerings, i.e. the two Snapdragon 845-powered models and their Exynos 9810-equipped counterparts. The crucial code is available for download directly from Samsung’s Open Source Release Center which can be accessed by referring to the banner below.
The move comes only a day before the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus are scheduled to officially hit the market on a global level, with Samsung once again demonstrating it’s prepared to support independent developers who themselves are interested in supporting its devices. The availability of kernel sources for the new Android flagships should enable the creation of both custom ROMs and recoveries, so combined with the existence of Google’s Project Treble, the new smartphones should be easier to support for the indie dev community than anything else Samsung released in the past.
Following their late February announcement, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus went through a two-week pre-order period and already found their way to most consumers who placed advanced orders on them around the world, according to recent reports. The Seoul-based tech giant hasn’t shared any pre-order performance figures of its new products, suggesting they haven’t managed to generate as much momentum as their record-breaking predecessors, though the company is still expecting both to outsell the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, as revealed by its mobile chief DJ Koh late last month. All variants of the phablets run Samsung Experience 9.0 based on Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box and should receive regular security patches for at least two years, as suggested by Samsung‘s track record with flagship software support.
Samsung Galaxy S9 Kernel Sources