14 DAY TRIAL // Today, Google made available for download the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean bits in the Android Open Source Project, and announced that it is available for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 devices.
Oddly enough, Google also listed there Verizon’s flavor of Galaxy Nexus, which was said only a few weeks ago to be rather difficult to bring to AOSP with full support.
However, the Jelly Bean code for the handset is now available for download, suggesting that this might actually become reality in the not too distant future.
But there are a few issues that haven’t been solved just yet, and which might take a while to put in order, so that Big Red’s Galaxy Nexus to be considered fully supported in AOSP, the same as the GSM flavor of the device is.
Jean-Baptiste Queru, technical lead at Google for the Android Open Source Project, explained all these in a series of posts on the Android Building Google Group.
“It's always been possible to create custom builds for the VZW Galaxy Nexus (we've always distributed all the files we could), but from this point you can expect that they'll be easier to develop and that they'll work better in Jelly Bean than they did in Ice Cream Sandwich,” he explained.
The same as with the GSM Galaxy Nexus, the available binaries include Wifi and Bluetooth, which are maintained by Broadcom; Graphics, maintained by Imagination Technologies; Orientation Sensor, maintained by Invensense; and the CDMA and LTE radios, which are maintained by Samsung.
Previously, only the Wifi, Bluetooth and Graphics binaries were available for the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon’s network.
According to Jean-Baptiste Queru, all should work just fine with the CDMA/LTE flavor of the device, the same as with the GSM version, except for the times when it won’t.
“In theory, the VZW Galaxy Nexus should work as well in AOSP as the GSM one (which doesn't mean that everything works, we're notably missing Camera, GPS and NFC),” he told Android Police.
“In practice, that's not quite true, and there are some issues that only appear when running AOSP builds on the VZW Galaxy Nexus, which don't exist in retail builds and don't exist on AOSP builds on the GSM Galaxy Nexus.”
All in all, it appears that Google has made significant advancements in offering support for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus in AOSP, although they are not there yet. The GSM version of the device benefits from full support, but Big Red’s model is a bit behind.