Notebookcheck Logo

Google outs ICS source code, defends Honeycomb

Teaser
Google says Honeycomb was not ready to be open sourced, and as Ice Cream Sandwich was in sight – they wanted you to focus on the later instead

Google has made the source codes software stacks for Ice Cream Sandwich now available for developers. This was made available through the usual Android Open-Source Project git servers. This means companies and developers who are working on their own devices based on the new version of Android can officially get to work.

"This is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus, the first Android 4.0 device," said Android Open-Source Project software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru said on Monday. "In the source tree, you will find a device build target named 'full_maguro' that you can use to build a system image for Galaxy Nexus. Build configurations for other devices will come later."

Incidentally, with this release, the history tree of previous version source codes were made available as well, which now obviously has Honeycomb in it. Note that Google didn’t make source codes of Honeycomb available to developers, and there were not many explanations for that as well. But now we have an answer, thanks to BetaNews. Queru said defending Honeycomb that they believed it was little “incomplete” so Google wanted people to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich instead. This also is the reason of not creating any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history tree along with that of ICS.)

Ice Cream Sandwich is the code name of the latest version of Android i.e. version 4.0. It is unique and in the sense that this will be the first Android to be able to run on both smartphones and tablets, and basically in any form factor without resolution constrain ability factors. 

Source(s)

Please share our article, every link counts!
Pallab Jyotee Hazarika, 2011-11-15 (Update: 2012-05-26)