If you’re not familiar with CyanogenMod, you should be: the firmware has been responsible for some of the best unofficial Android alterations available. But now the hackers are stumped: The CM9 port of Android 4.0 to older devices will probably come after the manufacturers’ own effort.
Proof that the manufacturers are finally doing things right?
The word comes from the CyanogenMod blog, in an official posting to explain the progress of the CM9 Android Ice Cream Sandwich port for Gingerbread devices. It’s not going smoothly:
The full Ice Cream Sandwich device update list
“Android 4.0 is such a major change from 2.3, we started with a fresh codebase from Google,” it reads. “This is a somewhat time-consuming process.”
The blog concedes that “as much as we’d like to stay ahead of the manufacturers, it may be a tie this time.” A tie? We already know that Samsung is working on porting Android 4.0 to the Galaxy S2, but will it actually beat the struggling hackers to it?
The Samsung Nexus S already has an official update to Ice Cream Sandwich, too, while HTC and the like are also making progress on getting the older phone catalogue ticked over.
Google: Android isn’t fragmented
With fragmentation being an oft-mentioned problem for Android in the past, it could be about time that the manufacturers started getting things done quicker than the hacking community.
If Samsung, HTC, Asus and their contemporaries can get into a habit of speedily firing out OS updates for older Android phones, it’ll free up the hackers to do more cool stuff, like this:
