Google has released the much awaited source code for their latest Android mobile operating system, Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. Google announced the Android Ice Cream Sandwich last month with their flagship mobile Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The released version is actually Android 4.0.1, which is the version that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smart phone will come when it debuts ICS to the world in late December.
According to a post by Jean-Baptiste Queru software engineer on the Android open source project, says, “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 Android 4.0.1 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available.
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“
Starting from today Android developers are able to use the Ice Cream Sandwich source code to start building Apps for it. Major mobile providers Samsung, HTC, SonyEricsson and Motorola are now able to start working on their versions of ICS and can update their existing mobiles and new lineups of mobiles with latest ICS.
There is also an updated version of the Android NDK, now in revision 7. The updated NDK lets developers who are using native code get started with the new native APIs available in Android 4.0. To download the source code tree you can follow the instruction from here. As it’s a major release the source code downloading may take some time, users will be required to wait till it completes and only then proceed with it.
Link: Android Source Tree