Sony Mobile is recognized as the manufacturer of the year by xda-developers.com

Good news on the Sony blog: Influential (almost like Habr ;-) The Xda-Developers mobile development community chose Sony Mobile as the “Manufacturer of the Year” (XDA Developers' OEM of the Year).

In their article, they explain the reasons for their choice, citing the following reasons, the main of which was Sony’s changed attitude towards independent developers and the sequence of steps in this direction:

The signal for change was a message from the Sony head of relations with developers about support for independent developers for Android ... Sony soon confirmed the changed attitude to the community by issuing instructions on unlocking the bootloader on Xperia S and then publishing not only the kernel sources, but also a guide to building it ... No other manufacturer has done anything like it today. This is the most complete compliance with the requirements of the GPLv2 that we have seen.

And they give a list of the remaining steps towards greater openness made by Sony Mobile in 2012:

• In March, Sony was the first among manufacturers to officially unveil ICS for Sony Xperia Play.
• In April, Sony released ICS for the entire line of devices in 2011, once again becoming the first manufacturer to do it.
• then the Sony team for developer relations announced a program that allowed developers to borrow Sony devices to test application performance
• in August, the Sony Xperia S became the first non-Nexus device, apart from the Motorola Xoom, included in the AOSP program as an experienced device. Following this, they released the AOSP binaries for Xperia S.
• That same August, Sony unveiled a proprietary code Dynamic Android Sensor Hardware Abstraction Layer (DASH)
• in October, they joined the XDA in Big Android BBQ to discuss plans for further interaction with the community
• recently they announced that they would continue to run the AOSP project for Xperia S in their own github gith and started merging in Android 4.2 (we wrote yesterday about this on Habré - lane )
• in their blog ( here it is - approx. lane ), Sony developers are actively involved in discussing views on Android, announce “Alpha” and “Beta” previews of software updates for their devices and collect feedback from users
• A number of Sony Mobile developers support the distribution of CyanogenMod firmware on some Sony devices.

And the Oscar goes to ...

Taking into account their large contribution to the Android community in 2012 and their complete rebirth over the past 16 months, Sony is becoming XDA's OEM of the Year 2012!

At the end of the article, they urge readers to vote for their manufacturer of the year. According to the voting results, Sony is currently gaining 54% of user votes; Vote and see the results here .