Back in april, the information released a report about a heretofore unknown project called android silver, a google initiative that would pay oems to ship unskinned "stock" android on their high-end phones. That sounds great for people who have to deal with slow software updates and wonky ui skins, but it came with a catch: Android silver would apparently mean the end of the long-running nexus program, which has given developers and enthusiasts pretty good hardware with google-managed software for years now.
This week at google i/o, google engineering director and nexus program manager david burke cast some doubt on that report:
"i think of my team, and there's two outputs: There's the open-source code we make available and everyone uses, and then there's nexus devices, and there's no way i could do open-source code without a nexus device," burke said. "you just can't get all the bugs, you can't actually experience it, you've got to live and breathe it day-in and day-out... So the idea of a nexus device will never go away, can't ever go away... So i think nexus continues to be very important for android."
burke also said that the team would continue to release new versions of android alongside new nexus hardware, as has become customary. "i don't see why we would change that," he said. "otherwise, if there was no nexus device, i'd have to launch something on existing nexus devices, and eventually in a couple years those devices would be out of date and then what do i do? I wouldn't be able to be sure that when i was open-sourcing code that it would actually work."
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/nexus-program-manager-says-nexus-devices-cant-ever-go-away/
