If you went back in time to 2015 and heard that Sony was one of the key contributors to Android O, the next iteration of mobile software from Google, would you believe it? After all, Sony has been plagued by their reputation for delivering Android updates at a snail’s pace in the past, something that has been drastically changing in the last 12 months. To that point, Sony was the first OEM to release Android 7.1.1, something that none of us would have thought possible two years ago. Now, according to Google, Sony has

 contributed more than 30 feature enhancements and 250 bug fixes. 

Chris Welch for The Verge:

 Chief among Sony’s priorities seems to be helping Android become a better platform for wirelessly enjoying high-res audio. Or at least something close to it, and substantially better than what Bluetooth does right now. Sony has contributed its LDAC wireless audio coding technology to Android O. LDAC can transfer much more data over Bluetooth — up to a bitrate of 990kbps — than what’s typically possible from smartphones. 

As wireless devices continue to become more ubiquitous with our lives and everybody takes a stab at wireless headphones, it makes sense that Sony would want to help inject their DNA into every Android smartphone, which would allow Sony to sell their LDAC-compatible devices to a far greater market.

 

This stands to mostly benefit Sony’s own products right now, since no one else is using LDAC and would likely have to pay a licensing fee to put it in a speaker or wireless headphones. It’s free to integrate into mobile devices, as Google confirmed LDAC is now part of the Android AOSP base code.

Will LDAC matter to most consumers listening to music on a $99 Bluetooth speaker? Nope. But as music services continue to push into lossless and high-resolution streaming (Spotify’s experimenting with it right now), this sort of thing will help audiophiles enjoy much improved audio without having to plug into the headphone jack — if their phone even has one.

 

No word yet on what other feature enhancements Sony contributed to but I wouldn’t be surprised if camera technology was one of them. Sony had, in the past, tried to cozy up with Google by releasing ‘Play Editions’ of their phones which were stock Android devices on Sony hardware, but they never took off. With Samsung clearly pursuing their own Tizen OS on the side in order to break from their dependency on Google, Sony might have another shot at becoming the darling of the Android world though with Google now more actively pushing to make their own hardware with the Pixel series, the partnership if such is to exist might not have the same impact as the one between Google and Samsung.