It seems more and more manufacturers are cosying up to the Android open source community. We recently saw HTC promise unlocked bootloaders from now on and it looks as if Samsung is getting in on the community love action by sending a shiny new Galaxy S II to the developers of the Cyanogen modified version of Android.
Google, God bless its little cotton socks, saw fit to make the Android operating system open source from the start. This has meant that, in addition to the versions of Android shipped with handsets – either vanilla stock or manufacturer modified – there have been community developed versions of Android available for many different handsets. How easy it has been to build these modded Android “roms” has depended a great deal on how easily “hackable” a particular phone was. This is one of the reasons why HTC’s recent announcement was good news.
One of the most popular community versions was Cyanogen’s. It provides a beautiful stock version of Android with optimisations and extra tweaks and features. It also has a growing list of officially supported phones.
On Monday June 6, one of the developers, AtinM, tweeted:
W00t! Just received the SGS2 from Samsung so we can work on CyanogenMod for it! You will not hear me bad-mouth Samsung again. 🙂
Having given a phone directly to a developer of a community driven Android rom, Samsung is implicitly giving its blessing to end users rooting their phones and installing these community versions of Android.
Perhaps we ought to ask God to bless their socks as well…
Either way, Android users are certainly feeling the love from manufacturers at the moment as openness abounds! Let’s all join hands and sing “Kumbayah”.
I need to give someone a hug…
