Sony Mobile recognized as manufacturer of the year by xda-developers.com



    Good news on the Sony blog: the influential (almost like Habr ;-) community of mobile developers Xda-Developers has chosen Sony Mobile as the "Manufacturer of the Year" (XDA Developers' OEM of the Year).

    In their article, they explain the reasons for their choice, citing the following reasons, the main one of which was the changed attitude of Sony towards independent developers and the sequence of steps in this direction:
    a signal for change was a message published by Sony's head of developer relations on support for independent developers for Android ... Soon, Sony confirmed the changed attitude towards the community by issuing instructions on unlocking the bootloader on Xperia S and then publishing not only the kernel sources, but also a guide for building it ... No other manufacturer has done anything like this to date. This is the most complete compliance with the GPLv2 requirements that we have seen.

    And they give a list of the remaining steps towards greater openness made by Sony Mobile in 2012:
    • in March, Sony was the first manufacturer to officially unveil public beta ICS for Sony Xperia Play
    • in April, Sony released ICS for the entire line of devices in 2011, once again becoming the first manufacturer to do so.
    • Sony's developer relations team then announced a program that allowed developers to lend Sony devices to test application performance
    • in August, the Sony Xperia S became the first non-Nexus device, apart from the Motorola Xoom, included in the AOSP program as an experienced device. Following this, they released AOSP binaries for Xperia S.
    • in the same August, Sony opened the proprietary code Dynamic Android Sensor Hardware Abstraction Layer (DASH)
    • in October, they joined XDA on Big Android BBQ to discuss plans for further community engagement
    • they recently announced that they would continue to conduct an AOSP project for Xperia S in their own github git and started merging in Android 4.2 (we wrote about it on Habr yesterday - approx. per. )
    • in their blog ( here it is - approx. per. ) Sony developers actively participate in the discussion of views on Android, announce “Alpha” and “Beta” previews of software update assemblies for their devices and collect feedback from users
    • A number of Sony Mobile developers support the distribution of CyanogenMod firmware on some Sony devices.

    And the Oscar goes to ...
    Given their great contribution to the Android community in 2012 and their complete transformation over the past 16 months, Sony becomes XDA's OEM of the Year 2012!

    At the end of the article, they encourage readers to vote for their producer of the year. According to the results of voting, Sony is currently gaining 54% of user votes; Vote and see the results here .

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