Found “Flounder” Code Could Signal Google’s Next Nexus
Over the last few months, we’ve gotten rumor after rumor about a potential Nexus 8 tablet coming from Google. First we heard it’d hit in April. Then we heard it’d hit in July. Since then, rumor-mongers stopped bothering with giving us specific months, and started saying it’ll be coming out this summer—from HTC, no less. But today, something slightly more concrete than a rumor hit the web: a piece of code that may be an actual, honest-to-goodness sign that Google is testing a new Nexus device.
A post on Myce points out a discovery on the issue tracker for Chromium, the open-source effort responsible for building and maintaining the Chrome web browser. There, a line of code was spotted that contains the word “flounder.” And that, of course, is a kind of fish.
Now, before you start calling my doctor to set up an appointment for me to get a CAT scan, just hang on a second. As the post points out, Google has been using names of fish as codenames for its Nexus projects: the Nexus 5 was “hammerhead,” while the Nexus 10 tablet was “manta,” and the Galaxy Nexus was “tuna” (with two different kinds of tuna, “maguro” and “toro,” representing the GSM or CDMA-ready versions of that device). In short, Google uses fish names for its Nexus devices. As such, this might be evidence that Google is testing Chrome on a Nexus 6 phone or a Nexus 8 tablet.
So now we’ve got a line of code on the Chromium site sporting an as-yet unknown “flounder” device. This could, obviously, be almost entirely meaningless. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the Verge reported that Google was simply going to pull the plug on the Nexus line of devices in general.
But that one report still isn’t quite enough to convince me that Google is ready to kill its Nexus line. There have been so many rumors over the last few months that it seems more plausible that the company is looking to bring at least one more Nexus out to market.
As to when or what, that remains uncertain. But if this flounder is any indication, it seems like Google is working on it right now, which might hopefully translate to a reveal and release sooner rather than later.