EZdroid plans OSGi based provisioning for Android

EZdroid have announced they are working on bringing the OSGi module systems to the Android platform, as part of a plan to create a software distribution platform for Google's open sourced mobile operating system. The EZdroid community has been founded by Netherlands based Luminis and German company Akquinet, who both have a long history working with the OSGi framework. The EZdroid project will be making user of the Apache Felix implementation of OSGi in combination with the currently incubating Apache ACE provisioning server. Luminis has had Apache Felix running on Android since 2007.

The plan appears to be to establish a software distribution framework for Android platforms which can install standalone applications or OSGi components. As open source Android implementations do not get access to the Google application marketplace, the work could potentially offer application stores for non-Google blessed Android implementations or enterprise specific software management. It is unclear at the moment, beyond establishing a platform, what the EZdroid collaborators long term plans are. Luminis do say that they are planning their own extensions to enable software licence and device management.

(djwm)