The Chinese developers behind the MIUI ROM and app suite for Android devices have announced that they’re opening the source code for their software.

MIUI is a custom version of Android that, quite frankly, looks a lot like iOS. The default MIUI home screen, for instance, replaces common application icons of all shapes with square icons — and there’s no app drawer. Instead all of your apps are displayed on the home screen. Unlike Apple’s mobile operating system, MIUI does support home screen widgets though.

The software also has a series of custom apps, a custom notification tray, and a consistent look and feel that was missing from Android until fairly recently.

MIUI is already available for a number of Android phones and tablets. Now that the project is going open source it’s likely that it will be ported to even more devices — and third party developers may have an easier time customizing the software or writing apps that feel like they were designed for MIUI.

The developers have already released the source code for  handful of apps including the compass, sound recorder, and file explorer apps.

via Android Central

HP has announced plans to release webOS as an open source project soon, but while the source code isn’t available yet some folks have already started working to port webOS to run on hardware originally designed to run designed for different operating systems.

WebOS-Internals member Ryan Hope posted a few pictures today of an HTC Evo 3D running a buggy build of webOS 3.0 today. The pictures are actually a few months old, and the phone isn’t really usable with HP’s operating system. But it shows what’s possible even without having access to the source code.

The version of webOS Hope is using was designed for the HP TouchPad tablet, and he picked the Evo 3D smartphone for his project because it feature similar hardware.

You can find a few more photos on Twitter.

via The Verge and PreCentral

Google has released the source code for Android 4.0. This is the first version of Android designed to run on both smartphones and tablets — but the version being released today is designed specifically for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

The Nexus S will be the first product to ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but now that the source code is being released it shouldn’t take long for independent developers to start tearing it apart and looking for ways to get it to run on other devices.

Smartphone and tablet makers will also likely be doing the same, which means that we could start to see additional devices shipping with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in the coming months.

Google has just started to upload the source to the Android Open Source Project servers so it could be a few hours before everything is available for download.

As an interesting side note, the latest code push actually includes all previous versions of Android, including Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Google never released the source code for Honeycomb to the public until now, because the company felt it was incomplete and only suited for use on tablets, not phones.

via Android Central

Google’s Dan Morrill has confirmed that the company will be releasing the source code for Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The company is just waiting until it’s “available on devices,” which means that sometime after the Samsung Galaxy Nexus starts shipping in November we should see the source code released.

It used to go without saying that Google would release the source for each new version of Android. While the company tends to work on Android operating system updates behind closed doors unlike the developers behind many other open source projects, up until this year Google has always eventually released the code to the public.

That changed with the launch of Android 3.0 Honeycomb. Google decided that while the operating system played nicely with tablets, it wasn’t up to snuff for phones. So in an effort to prevent hardware makers from putting out subpar smartphones with Honeycomb, Google simply withheld the source code.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwhich is designed to run on both phones and tablets, and it sounds like we should see the code released before the end of the year. That’s good news for smaller hardware makers. Big name companies have been able to work directly with Google to create tablets with Honeycomb software, but smaller vendors often don’t have that kind of relationship with Google and have to rely on open source code.

It’s also good news for independent developers working on custom ROMs for Android devices based on the AOSP (Android Open Source Project). While some developers have created custom firmware based on the Honeycomb emulator images released in the Android Software Development Kit, there’s a lot more you can do when you have access to the full source.

The popular CyanogenMod Android distribution, for instance, is based on AOSP code — and so while CyanogenMod has been updated recently with some “tablet tweaks” that allow the operating system to play better with tablets, it’s still based on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread because that’s the last version of Android to be open sourced. After Ice Cream Sandwich goes open source, the CyanogenMod team and other developers will be able to start working on Android 4.0 custom ROMs.

VLC is a popular open source audio and video player for Linux, Windows, and Mac computers. There’s also a version for Android in the works, and earlier this month the developers launched a private beta. But if you didn’t get in on the beta, you can still test out an early alpha build of VLC.

The folks at VideoLan have offered instructions for compiling the app from source for a while, but one developer has been kind enough to do the heavy lifting so that you can just download and install an APK file directly on your phone or tablet. There are two different builds available (NEON and NONEON) as well as instructions for figuring out which version you want.

While VLC for Android is still clearly a work in progress, the app looks pretty good and does an excellent job with video playback. That alone isn’t all that exciting, as there are more than a dozen excellent video players available for Android. But VLC is also a music player, which means it may eventually be the only multimedia app you’ll need on your phone or tablet.

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The developer behind one of the coolest jailbreak utilities around has released the source code. This allows anyone to examine how the exploit works, and possibly to improve upon it.

JailbreakMe 3.0 provides the easiest way to jailbreak an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad running iOS 4.3.3 or earlier is to use JailbreakMe 3.0. Basically you point your mobile web browser at a web site, click a button, and your device will download a corrupted PDF file, start running some code, and in a few seconds the Cydia store will be installed allowing you to download and install apps that aren’t available from the official App Store.

That includes apps that alter the behavior of your device at the system level, changing the way you receive notifications or changing the logo that appears when you first boot your device, for instance.

More than a million iOS devices were jailbroken using the exploit in the first few days. A few days later Apple released a software update closing the security hole, so you can’t use JailbreakMe to open up a device running iOS 4.3.4 or higher. But the source code may hold some value for posterity… or for anyone that hasn’t yet upgraded their device.

In the meantime, there are other ways to jailbreak a device running iOS 4.3.4.

Google has released the portions of the Android 3.2 source code which are licensed under the GPL. Just like earlier versions of Google Android 3.x Honeycomb, Google is not releasing all the source code for the latest version of the operating system. You’ll have to wait until the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android is released to get that. But the latest release means two things:

1. Google Android 3.2 is just about ready to go, so we should see tablets shipping with the OS soon.
2. Now that at least some source code is available, independent developers can start digging in to find interesting bits that can lead to more interesting apps or operating system tweaks.

Google Android 3.2 Honeycomb is optimized to run on tablets with 7 inch and larger displays, including the Huawei MediaPad.

Update: Motorola has already started rolling out Android 3.2 for the Motorola XOOM WiFi tablet.

One of the key components of Google’s Android operating system is the Dalvik virtual machine which is required to run Android applications. But now there’s a new open source project called In-The-Box which brings Dalvik to iOS, allowing you run Android apps on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

The process isn’t all that simple at this point, and the project is really geared at developers rather than end users. Don’t expect to be able to download an app from the Android Market and simply port it to your iPhone on your own.  But developers can use the tools to get their Android apps up and running on iOS with just a few minor changes, and eventually we could see those apps in the App Store.

That could eventually make the process of developing cross-platform apps much simpler. Instead of writing apps from scratch for each platform, In-The-Box could make it possible to simply write Android apps and quickly port them to iOS — assuming Apple approves the apps. Of course, Android and iOS devices have different function keys and other hardware, so odds are you’ll want to make some changes to the overall user interface for your apps if developing for both platforms anyway.

You can check out a demo video after the break.

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