There has been a rumor going around recently that Sony is developing AOSP ROMs for some of its high-end smartphones and tablets. An AOSP ROM would bring a near vanilla Android OS experience to these devices and do away with any and all customizations that the company might have made to the OS. Sony has come out today and clarified that it is not developing any such software.
Well to be fair, Sony has said that its not developing AOSP ROMs for now, that doesn’t mean it won’t do this at some point in the future. The company has clarified in a blog post that it is currently not its plan to release AOSP ROMs but calls the idea “interesting” owing to the feedback it has received online.
Sony has released binaries and source code which basically forms the base for developers to work on for a few devices but they are at a very early stage, however that’s not everything developers require to make fully functional custom ROMs.
Since the company releases its hardware with bootloaders that can easily be unlocked it is appreciated quite a bit by the Android modding community. It is Sony’s plan to provide a stable base for community developers and that’s about as far as its willing to go right now. Perhaps in the future it may start pumping out fully done AOSP ROMs for its high-end smartphones and tablets. We may have to wait a bit on that.