Google releases Ice Cream Sandwich code

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Google has made its Android 4.0.1 – or Ice Cream Sandwich – code available for developers and OEMs to play around with.

The announcement came from Google software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru, who noted it was the code for 4.0.1 being released, as that's the version set to appear on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus when the device arrives this month.

The release also includes code from previous versions of Android.

"This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases," Queru said, in a post on a Google developer forum.

"However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we haven't created any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history.)"

Queru had a warning for developers planning on downloading the code, however.

"Since this is a large push, please be aware that it will take some time to complete. If you sync before it's done, you'll get an incomplete copy that you won't be able to use, so please wait for us to give the all-clear before you sync," he added.

The Ice Cream Sandwich-based Galaxy Nexus was made available for pre-order on 3 yesterday.

It emerged today that Android is far and away the most popular mobile OS at the current time. Of all smartphones sold to end users in the third quarter of 2011, over half were based on Android.

iPhone sales, meanwhile, saw a drop of 3 million from the second quarter, Gartner data revealed.

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