Android officially endorses AT&T’s 5GE thing

Now that AT&T has got the all clear the Android Open Source Project has decided to embrace 5G Evolution.

The news comes courtesy of XDA Developers, which spotted a recent addition to the Android Open Source Project site headed ‘Add 5G evolution icon’ and supported with the instruction to ‘…add the 5GE icon to the system UI for specific carriers LTE CA network.’

Right now we have no reason to assume those specific carriers are any other than AT&T but, since the implied threshold for being able to display that icon is nothing more than an LTE signal with a bit of carrier aggregation sprinkled on top, in principle anyone else could jump on the bandwagon if they felt like rebranding their LTE-A as 5G-adjacent.

The apparent failure of Sprint to get any legal support for its claim that 5GE is misleading to consumers, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that people think the presence of a 5G icon on their phones might mean they’re getting 5G, presumably emboldened Android to endorse it. This could end up backfiring on AT&T, however, when it tries to convince customers who already think they’re getting 5G to pay more for an upgrade.