We’re very excited to announce that you’ll soon be able to install XBMC to devices operating on the popular Android platform, meaning it will become cheaper and easier for more and more people to begin using XBMC. This is a creation that is truly going to advance the future of this community as we know it.
Android is an operating system that poowers different platforms such as smart phones and tablets, but is also used in the development of set top boxes, similar to the Apple TV, without the need for jailbreaking (as third party software installation is encouraged). This will hopefully enable television enthusiasts to use this cheaper and easier to acquire alternative to the Apple TV for use with the XBMC media player.
The creation of XBMC for Android seems to have been sponsored by a company called Pivos, which creates Android based set top hardware, however thankfully the XBMC development team has said that it would be available for any device operating on the open source Android platform. This means that XBMC would most likely be available from the Google Play store (for free though), thus requiring no technical knowledge to install.
There’s still testing needed to be done seemingly before they’ll release it but they are saying that beta builds will be posted to the Pivos forum in the near future for owners of their devices. Hopefully this new port of XBMC will be easy to operate on cheaper Chinese manufactured hardware, but only time will tell, once the XBMC foundation reports what the minimum requirements are for use with XBMC for Android. What we need now is for Android developers to get involved in order to smooth the quirks out of the software.
