Google hints Android Ice Cream Sandwich is on the horizon

Google is helping developers prepare for the forthcoming release of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), which will see a standardised verison of the mobile operating system in use across smartphones and tablets.

The company has confirmed it will release an SDK to allow developers to adjust existing Honeycomb-based apps for use on smartphones, without much modification.

The SDK will also allow developers to build in the Action Bar, which can currently only be found on tablet devices running Honeycomb.

Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com, noted that once ICS is released the same version of Android will run on all devices, regardless of screen size.

"Some Honeycomb apps assume that they'll run only on a large screen, and have baked that into their designs. This assumption is currently true, but will become false with the arrival of ICS, because Android apps are forward-compatible," he said on the Android Developers blog.

"Once ICS is released, users will be able to install apps built on Honeycomb. We haven't released the ICS SDK just yet, but you can start preparing your Honeycomb apps by thinking about how they should work on smaller screens."

Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, confirmed the existence of ICS at Mobile World Congress earlier this year.

Google making developers aware of the options that ICS will bring suggests the release is drawing nearer, and there is speculation it could arrive in October or November.

Google has had severe fragmentation issues with Android, and this is partly to do with the quick release cycle and popularity of devices.

ICS aims to deal with this but it could take time to be adopted. Currently, smartphones are only capable of supporting Android 2.3 Gingerbread and most tablets run Honeycomb 3.0.