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Credits where credits are due. Sony had promised a comprehensive Android 5.1 roll-out to the quasi entirety of its line-up from the past years, and the company is steadily fulfilling that promise. After updating the Xperia Z3 and Z2 series of phones and tablets, it's time for older devices in the Sony ranks to join in on the Lollipop action.
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It seems like the only thing anybody can talk about is Android M, but we should remember that we've got about 4 more months with Lollipop v5.1.1 as the current version until Mango Mojito (probably not) is officially released in October. This is no more apparent than when an update appears on AOSP and brings with it thousands of changes. In fact, this update is large enough it probably deserved more than a barely noticeable revision bump.
Some over-the-air updates just began their rollout to the Nexus 4 and 2013 Nexus 7 LTE, bringing their build versions up to LMY47O. If you're curious about what's actually different, we've generated a changelog with all of the gory details. That is to say, not much has changed. Sadly, the list of commits is limited to fixing a handful of relatively trivial and uncommon bugs.
It should come as no surprise that Android is due for a v5.1.1 release at some point, even if only to fix a particularly well-known memory leak. Now, thanks to an SDK update, we've got good reason to anticipate the new version is probably due out in the very near future. If developers check the SDK Manager for updates, they should see a new revision to the Platform SDK with a product description that reads "Android SDK Platform 5.1.1."
In good Android tradition, every major version is followed by a series of build releases intended to quickly fix a small batches of issues. These updates usually come out to cure critical bugs, but sometimes they're just cleaning up a few relatively trivial mistakes. AOSP was just updated with a brand new version, tagged 5.1.0_r3. We've generated a changelog to show just what's different.
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With the code for Android 5.1 Lollipop now fully uploaded to the Android Open Source Project, it's time to hunt for new features and capabilities that we haven't already uncovered. With a total of 14,686 changes, there's a lot to look through in the latest changelog. A few very telling commit messages have already been discovered, but there are surely many more interesting messages waiting to be found.
No sooner had Google announced the Android 5.1 update, that the factory images for the new version started popping up for some Nexus devices. Notably absent, however, was Google's latest and greatest — the Nexus 6. If you're using this phone and you are impatient about getting the software update, you should be happy to know that the wait is almost over, hopefully.
Google is progressively rolling out the full array of releases for Android 5.1, and the SDK is now joining the ranks. If developers open up the SDK Manager today, they will find a brand new software development kit for API 22. The SDK package is there, along with the typical documentation, samples, source code, and an assortment of system images for each of the major hardware architectures. All is ready to start updating apps to take advantage of everything Android 5.1 has to offer.
As if it wasn't already news, Apple announ... Android 5.1 is officially launching today. While the latest version already made its debut on a few Android One phones, the rest of us have been (impatiently) waiting for our chance to check it out on some Nexus hardware. We're still looking for OTA packages and factory images, but it looks like Google is already busy uploading the source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).