By Karl-Johan Dahlström
25th January 2012. 16:30
Tag Archives: custom rom
As part of our continuing efforts towards openness and knowledge sharing, we are now stepping up our open source activities. For a long time, we have been one of the major contributors to the Android Open Source Project. We’ve also been active in the open developer community where we most notably published an ICS alpha release a couple of months ago. And now, we’re excited to release a couple of new open source projects that are available on our GitHub. As you can see below, we have just now released two very interesting projects as open source: the analysis tool ChkBugReport, and our WebGL implementation for Android™ 4.0.
This way, we would like to continue to be transparent, share our knowledge, and get external developer contributions to make the tools even better. On our GitHub, you can also find our Web SDK project we published a while back, and a project called DrmLicenseService, which we will tell more about soon. Stay tuned for more information about open source projects going forward!
Last week we made an Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available for unlocked Xperia™ phones. The response we got was overwhelming, and we want to say a big thank you for all your great feedback and the huge interest shown! We will look through all the comments we received in the survey, on the blog post and on the video, and incorporate the input into our planning of future software and product releases. We have now also made the open source archive for the Ice Cream Sandwich alpha ROM available. In addition, the sensor HAL will also be available as open source soon.
To show our continuous support to the open developer community, and get your valuable feedback, we are today making an alpha ROM of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.1) for Xperia™ arc S, Xperia™ neo V and Xperia™ ray available for download. This is something we have not done before, and we are obviously very excited about it.
This ROM is strictly targeting advanced developers, and it will not work for ordinary everyday usage, as it only has a limited set of features working (you can for example not make any phone calls). Several more legal and usage conditions apply – please see the Important information section below for more details.
As promised when we announced our support of independent developers, we have now made the camera library binaries for a number of Sony Ericsson phones available under a special end user license agreement (EULA). You can use these camera libraries to handle the camera hardware in our 2011 Xperia™ phones except Xperia™ PLAY, which has a different camera module.
Download and find out more after the jump.
In developer forums worldwide, there is a huge activity and engagement in the open Android™ ecosystem. And we also know there are a lot of independent developers out there who are creating their own custom ROMs or modifying the kernel. The Sony Ericsson Developer program is following this community with great interest, and even though Sony Ericsson is not supporting all the activities by independent developers, we recognize that custom ROMs are a part of the Android ecosystem.
We therefore decided to assist a group of developers called “FreeXperia”. The overall open developer community is important to Sony Ericsson, and we hope to learn from it, and share knowledge ourselves. The FreeXperia group was supported with devices and technical know-how, and they are now in the process of creating custom ROMs based on the CyanogenMod for several of our latest Xperia™ phones, including Xperia™ PLAY and Xperia™ arc.
Karl-Johan Dahlström, Head of Developer Relations, explains more after the jump.
Important note: By unlocking your phone and running a custom ROM you may void the warranty. See your phone’s warranty statement for details.
