We recently covered the Golden Key that was supposedly leaked to the public. WindowsBlogItalia reports that thanks to that key a Nokia Lumia 525 has successfully booted up Android 6.0.1, however, the developer of the project says that a “reset vector exploit” was used.
Android is something a lot of people want on their Lumia’s and different projects to port Android to Lumia’s have been started but never finished. But this time, we actually have a possible release date. The developer of the project, Triszka Balázs, commented on his own video that a preview may get released next weekend, which is the 27th or the 28th August:
If EVERYTHING goes right we will release a developer preview next weekend.
Now let’s get to the fun part. The video shows a Nokia Lumia 525, it is shown with a completely black screen for the first few seconds and then a CyanogenMod boot screen boots up. Just like it’s supposed to. The operating system seemed a little sluggish and scrolling was lacking but these aren’t the biggest problems that the developers are having. WiFi, Audio, 3G Modem and much, much more isn’t working. This is a very early internal preview, and most of the issues will probably not be fixed until the release.
The reset vector exploit only works for Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 devices, so do not request a Lumia 950 port for it. The developer says it is indeed possible to get it to run on other devices, but that would require a lot of work. Other devices currently planned to get Android are Nokia Lumia 920, Nokia Lumia 820 and Nokia Lumia 520. Technically any phone supported by the Windows Phone Internals can run Android but a lot of work is required to reverse engineer the drivers and rewrite them. Just getting the Lumia 520/525 display driver took many months of work to complete.
This is a huge milestone for Windows Phone hacking. It is the first time we see full Android run natively on originally Windows-powered hardware and it may be our first step to losing the “boring” tag that many Android hackers are giving to the Windows Phone community. Let’s hope that “EVERYTHING goes right,” and that we will see a preview soon.
