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Well here we go again, hopefully this will clear up that whole mess from last week where it looked like Google was dropping support for its’ CDMA devices like the Verizon Galaxy Nexus and the Sprint Nexus S 4G, and the upcoming Sprint Galaxy Nexus. According to Android engineer Dan Morril, the device is still a supported “Nexus” device for “everyday use” and will receive updates and all that jazz. Google is just now making it public that they can’t lock down licenses for CDMA binaries like they do with GSM, therefore they cannot distribute them. So to have their developer pages represented appropriately, they have to say that “no CDMA devices are supported.”

Here’s the full message:

Hi, all! Thanks for all the questions. Here’s a quick omnibus to answer the questions folks have asked…

First, just to be clear this change is only related to AOSP support for these devices — that is, personal custom builds. These are obviously still officially-supported Nexus devices for everyday use, they will receive official software updates, and so on. Similarly, these are still fully-supported development devices for app developers.

Second, as I noted at the top of the thread, Nexus devices will still have unlocked bootloaders, and we’ll continue to make available as many of the closed-source binaries as we can. CDMA support in AOSP has always been more challenging than GSM, and this change is a reflection of that reality.

On that topic, here’s a quick clarification on the core issue. Every device has a number of closed-source software packages included on it. Though Google distributes some of these binaries for Nexus devices for use with AOSP, Google does not own the software. Rather, this software is variously owned by the device manufacturer, the carrier, and their suppliers. We try to get distribution rights for as many of these binaries as possible, but in some cases it is difficult or impossible to obtain these rights. (CDMA specifically has a tricky history of intellectual property.) Combined with the technical issues of needing to sign the apks correctly, this has prevented us from obtaining the distribution rights we need to support these devices in AOSP.

Finally, we will of course continue to work on improving support. If we can resolve these issues, we’ll certainly restore CDMA support to AOSP. In the meantime, we’ve updated our docs to be more accurate about the degree of support.

In simpler words, CDMA is just a pain where the sun don’t shine! As far as custom ROM’s, you can almost guarantee that we will see plenty of custom ROMs for the Galaxy Nexus and other CDMA Google Nexus devices, so don’t worry about that. If they had just made a simple blog post over at the Android Developers blog, they could have saved this big headache from us all. But anyways looks like we finally have answers.

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Alexander Maxham

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Alex is passionate about everything technology, specifically Android devices. He loves reading and writing about any type of technology, but Android is his favorite. Currently his weapon of choice is Motorola's Droid Bionic running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. Alex is usually thinking about his next 10 blog posts, or on Twitter finding more news to bring to Android Authority's loyal fans.