Jelly Bean hits open source community, geeks rejoice

Normally I wouldn’t be overly excited to share this kind of news with anyone, however, the very short turnaround time from Google’s Android developers has me in good spirits. Android has long been plagued by slow updates, but it seems as though the company has finally decided to be more prompt about these things.

As rosy as that seems, I can’t help but feeling that the quick push of Android 4.1.1, Jelly Bean, to the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) is in direct relation to the pending Apple lawsuit against Samsung for the local search component of Ice Cream Sandwich on Google’s flagship, Galaxy Nexus.

Either way, I’m happy that less than two weeks after Jelly Bean was announced and demonstrated at Google I/O, AOSP lead Jean-Baptiste Queru, or JBQ as he is known in the Android world, announced that the source code for the mobile OS is now available.

For those who don’t know, this means that developers can now sync their repos with the AOSP and bring us a whole bunch of customised Jelly Bean goodness. I’ve been jumping between the developer preview released at Google I/O and ICS 4.0.4 for the past couple of weeks and judging on the speed and polish of 4.1, I can only imagine how fantastic the final product will be.

If you have a Galaxy Nexus, keep an eye on the forums from tomorrow, or even later today, when the custom ROMs will start popping up. I remember getting my first Froyo (2.2) device and remember how awesome I thought it was, but that’s only because it was my first proper smartphone, the only other time I’ve been as excited about a smartphone was when I first booted my Galaxy Nexus up with Jelly Bean loaded.

Android is in a very, very good place at the moment, now OEMs, let’s get those updates out quick snap. For today though, let us Nexus owners rejoice, because our devs are about to give it the beans.

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