HTC is convinced that the cupcake update will legitimately make it to the T-mobile G1

[DesignDawg]

There was a ridiculously crap article at AndroidGuys (I'll leave it to you to find and read it...it doesn't warrant being spread around here) that speculated that the G1 might never see it, because it is in "bad shape" and really unstable on the G1. My first thought when I read it was "DUH!! It's not finished, and the source they have out that people are compiling is just the OS! It doesn't have the G1-specific hardware drivers or anything..."

Fortunately, Dianne (those in the know know who that is) responded to that stupid thread saying:

Your informant doesn’t really understand how Android operates as an open-source project. The “cupcake” branch that we have is a work-in-progress on the next major feature set for the android platform. Things like video recording don’t work because… surprise, it’s not yet done. The current code that exists as cupcake is almost but not quite feature complete, which means that it is pre-alpha — no QA at all has started on it yet, since the basic features are not quite yet implemented.

So at some point “cupcake” will become a final release candidate (RC) after going through alpha and beta testing/fixing, at which point it becomes the most recent stable android platform that people can build production phones off of. That will actually be our first RC quality code in the open-source tree, since what is there from before them is based on the 1.0 RC that was the basis of the G1 software but required a number of changes (which are not tested) to be able to make it publicly available.

Notice how she uses the pronoun "we" in there, and speaks with authority? Dianne Hackborn. Rings Extended. She's a major Google Android employee, and she knows her stuff. She can be a little gruff. Probably too much testosterone.