After Myce discovered in the Chromium issue tracker a fish-based codename (Flounder) for a Google device running an early-May Android version, speculating that Flounder may be the Nexus 8/9 tablet tipped to be made by HTC, xda-developers has dug deeper and found more evidence that HTC is the maker of Flounder. Additionally, what could also be a Nexus device codenamed “Molly” has also been spotted.
Digging through the Android 4.4.3 KitKat MR2 changelist, the publication found lines of code that associate Flounder to HTC, as seen below:
project device/htc/flounder/
f6f0fe7 flounder: fix KGDB port
d9a03bc flounder: take out conservative cpufreq governor a.o. extraneous stuff
091c1c1 flounder: add Power HAL
project device/htc/flounder-kernel/
6090a06 flounder: update kernel prebuilt
Interestingly, Molly was also spotted in the same KitKat MR2 build, although it’s not clear who will make the device – those lines of code follow below:
project device/google/molly/
60f0dd6 molly: keystore: add keystore hal
1dcb7b7 molly: correcting too wide permissions for certain devnodes
eadd23b molly: set permissions for nvhost-msenc
c554447 [molly][drm] Implement rules for Discretix module
787e5e7 Fix the file permission for mbtchar0
fe0c51a Update releasetools.py to support separate prod and test key bootloaders
e610c57 Set BT minor code to SET_TOP_BOX instead of HIFI.
5d64459 molly: Do not init p2p for wlan0 interface
c0626ba Disable throughput hinting for gpu frequency scaler.
project device/google/molly-kernel/
81386aa Update kernel
11ab4e9 Update kernel
9d7bca3 Update kernel
bea8097 Update kernel
55591db Update kernel
342aa11 Update kernel
481e0a6 Update kernel:
b904ad3 Update kernel
4d2f31f Update kernel
dc305ba Update kernel
d508d83 Update kernel
5668370 Update kernel
Google is expected to unveil an HTC-made Nexus 8 or Nexus 9 tablet this summer, possibly alongside a new Android 4.5 OS version, and a Nexus 6 smartphone in fall based on the LG G3.
