Sony’s worked to be friendly with the Android development and tweaking communities in recent years, offering an AOSP for Xperia project that makes it easy to load the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) onto its flagship phones. Now Sony has taken things a step further by adding support for Android M.
Sony today announced that developers can create a test image of the Android M Developer Preview and load it onto a handful of devices in the Sony Open Device program, including the Xperia Z3, Xperia Z2, Xperia Z1, and Xperia M2. Sony also included a brief video that shows the AOSP flavor of Android M running on the Xperia Z3 Compact.
It’s worth noting that because this is the AOSP version of Android, you’re not going to be getting Google apps like Gmail and Chrome built in. The software is also missing pieces of software that aren’t open source, so you’re not going to be able to use the cellular modem and camera. Because of these limitations, you’re probably not going to want to load this software onto your daily driver.