I shouldn’t give Motorola too much guff. It’s great that they’re elaborating on their process for updating their devices to Ice Cream Sandwich. It helps their users to get a better sense that this is not just a case of Motorola dragging their feet, but it’s actually quite an involved process to integrate their device customizations with a brand-new version of the Android OS.
(photo credit: Motorola)
You can read about the full process on their blog post, but the gist is that the selected partner that manufactures the “Google Experience Device” (in this case Samsung, since they developed the Galaxy Nexus) gets first dibs on the latest version of Android directly from Google, working together with Google to release the flagship phone at the right time. Then Google releases the source code for other manufacturers (and everyone else) to access for their devices.
It is at this point that Motorola (and other manufacturers) goes through the source code to assess what features are available and which of their devices have the appropriate hardware to support the new OS. From then, they do the work to update their device-specific customizations to be compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich and do lots and lots of testing to make sure everything is working up to spec. They submit the upgrade to their carrier partners, which in and of itself could take a huge amount of time to be certified. Sometimes they do a pre-release to do see how the upgrade does before doing a wide release to all users.
While Motorola was forthcoming about their process for migrating to Ice Cream Sandwich, they didn’t give any concrete dates on when they will have Ice Cream Sandwich ready. They did reiterate that right now the DROID RAZR, XOOM tablets, and the DROID BIONIC are slated to get an upgrade to Android 4.x.
They mentioned that when the information is available, they’ll give out release dates, and information about any other devices that may get the ICS update. Stay tuned.
Via Android Central
