Today, Dan Morrill of the Android Team revealed a message through post, to the Android Building Google group updating the status of code availability due to recent server downtime. They are planning to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.
These words given by Morrill was music to the ears of ROM developers and Android modders everywhere and provided the new source is released in a timely fashion it means top-tier software developers such as the CyanogenMod team will have that much more time to craft up some beautiful alternative OS builds for those that love to root their phones and experiment with various software.
Last night, Google released the SDK for Ice Cream Sandwich, but was mum on when the source code would be released. As a result, developers felt left down and abandoned once again. The news that Google will release the souce along with the Galaxy Nexus in November comes as great news.
I think before letting us know, developers will be beating manufacturers to the punch once again, putting Ice Cream Sandwich on any and every device possible. It should also help to quiet some detractors who claim Android isn’t as open source as Google may claim, but that’s still up for debate.
Dan Morrill admitted today that the Ice Cream Sandwich source code would be made available to the general public “soon” after the software begins appearing on new and existing Android devices. And Google admitted in a blog post today that with Android 4.0, its calendar and text-to-speech APIs will become publicly documented.
Google didn’t want to take a chance of ‘creating a really bad user experience’, so it kept Honeycomb’s code out of public hands.
This means that developers who have been using undocumented APIs will have to make some changes to their apps with the release of Ice Cream Sandwich. Anyhow this was great news to all, and further I think developers will not be affected by these changes.
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