Earlier today, the team over at Droid-life spotted something odd going on with the AOSP. Where there were previously resources available for all the hardware Google considered developer devices, suddenly several models were missing, including the LTE version of the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon. While the mystery remained for a few hours, Google has now stepped forward to explain things, revealing that it can no longer keep providing the same level of support it had been for CDMA devices.

While Android itself may be open-source, Google explains that recent CDMA models it’s been dealing with have included necessary functionality as a pre-compiled binary APK provided by the carrier. Problem is, a developer going to build Android for one of these devices won’t have access to the platform keys needed to authenticate the APKs in question, and any software made without them is going to be missing essential phone-related abilities.

None of this means that your Verizon LTE Galaxy Nexus won’t receive all of Google’s attention when it comes to future software updates, only that it’s not a good fit for really ambitious developers working on their own custom system builds.

Source: Google

Via: Droid-life