Android opens up a little bit more with “cupcake” branch

The first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, has been out for a couple of months now, and it’s turned out to be a nicely hackable phone. Google has opened things up a bit more by making a read-only development branch, “cupcake”, available for public perusal. If you’re wondering when we’ll see these enhancements on a shipping Android phone, it’s gotten one step closer since the cupcake branch came out:

The changes introduced in the cupcake branch have been merged into the master branch, preserving all of the previous commits to master. The same will happen for each future drop to cupcake.

If you’re not familiar with the guts of software development, what this means is that Google’s Android developers took two complex pieces of software (the official, stable version of the Android operating system + the experimental version with all the new bells and whistles) and combined them, reconciling any differences and combining them into a seamless whole.

“cupcake” development branch [via phandroid]

For those of you who don’t want to hack your own firmware to open it up completely, you can get an unlocked, hackable phone direct from Google.