Looks like our phones won’t be getting a Key Lime Pie flavoured version of Android after all, as Google’s Sundar Pichai has confirmed that the next version of the company’s mobile operating system will be called Android KitKat.
Android KitKat won’t be the long-awaited Android 5.0 though, instead it will be an incremental update to Android 4.4 — although given the name change, we should see a little more than we did with Android 4.3.
According to the director of Android partnerships John Lagerling, who was speaking to the BBC, Google had referred to the version as Key Lime Pie internally, but realised that “very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie.”
The Kit Kat is supposedly a favourite treat of Android codemonkeys, so they reached out to Nestle (the owners of the Kit Kat trademark) to strike up a deal — and the rest is, as you say, history. The idea was supposedly so well received by Nestle that the company had a deal signed within 24 hours, but no money changed hands.
Nestle is evidently riding the coattails of the announcement, launching its own promotion to coincide with Android KitKat.
People who pick up specially marked KitKat bars will win either a Nexus 7 or Google Play Credit. You may also be lucky enough to pick up one of 50 million Droid-bug shaped Kit Kat in 19 markets — including the UK, US, Brazil, Japan, Russia and India.
That wasn’t the only good news that Google had to share, with Android now surpassing one billion device activations — a number that was just 900 million back in May, and way ahead of the target set by Eric Schmidt, which was one billion by the end of the year.
Now the KitKat name has been confirmed, it’s time to speculate what the next version of the OS will go by — place your bets now.
