Google unleashes Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich source code

MOBILE SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has released the source code for its latest mobile operating system (OS), Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

The open source code is now available for all to download. The version released is actually Android 4.0.1, which is the version that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone will come with when it debuts ICS to the world.

Jean-Baptiste Queru, software engineer on the Android open source project at Google said, "Hi! We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in. Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available."

Android 4.0 ICS has been designed to unify the smartphone - 2.3 Gingerbread -and tablet - 3.x Honeycomb - versions of Google's mobile OS. Its new features include face detection to unlock the device, support for near field communication (NFC) data sharing and improved multitasking.

"This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich," added Queru.

There are no tags for Android 3.x Honeycomb in the code to keep the focus on ICS rather than porting the former to smartphones. This is why Google didn't release the source code for Android Honeycomb.

Android smartphone makers can start getting sorted for upgrades to Android 4.0 ICS and users will hope that they will come sooner rather than later. µ