Back in February, we highlighted the fact that Oppo was still not providing source for their low-end handset, the Neo 5. After nearly 8 months, we’re happy to report that Oppo has finally released the source code for the phone.
Under the conditions of the General Public License (GPL) V2, Oppo, and all companies who release devices running Android, are required to make the source available. Unlike some companies who only make it available upon request, Oppo has actually done well, releasing the source code to GitHub.
But not so fast. The Neo 5 source provided by Oppo, won’t compile, but it’s nothing terribly malicious. There’s a couple of reasons the source code won’t compile; firstly there’s a number of broken headers within the source, and secondly Oppo uses an external script to manually turn on If defs, but the script isn’t included in the source.
Luckily for members of the development community who are interested in developing for the Neo 5, a member of the CyanogenMod team has actually fixed the code to a point where the source will compile. You can find that working copy of the Neo 5 source on GitHub as well.
For owners of the Oppo Neo 5 wanting to investigate custom ROMs, this is promising that we could start to see some development on the phone – perhaps a custom ROM or two. It’s taken a while but it’s here, so if you’re interested, get on over to one of those GitHub links and start tweaking.
