Unofficial Android 6.0 Marshmallow port now available for the Google Nexus S

A skilled Android developer by the name of Dmitry Grinberg has managed to port Android 6.0 Marshmallow on the Google Nexus S. If you're new to the Android ecosystem, the Nexus S launched all the way back in April 2011. The handset got its last update - to Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean - back in October 2012 when Google stopped officially supporting the device.

Before diving into the details, we'd like to first take a look at the hardware specs of the Nexus S, just so we can observe the tremendous progress that our phones went through in the past few years. The Nexus S landed with a 4-inch AMOLED display running a resolution of 480 by 800 pixels, a 1GHz single-core Qualcomm Hummingbird chipset, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage space.

According to Grinberg, this Android 6.0 Marshmallow port for the Nexus S was built as a way to show that even archaic smartphones can run the latest versions of Android if there's enough interest. Grindberg had to overcome many challenges before making Marshmallow work on the Samsung-made Nexus S, one of which is really interesting to discuss.

Many might not remember this, but the Google Nexus S came with two storage partitions, as did many handsets based on older Android versions. While modern Android phones mash everything together in a single storage partition, older phones came with a large partition for storing the media, and a smaller one to hold the OS and the apps. Grindberg's challenge came from the fact that the system partition on the Nexus S could only hold 1GB of data, which wasn't enough for installing Android 6.0 Marshmallow and all of the apps. To solve the problem, the developer migrated everything to the 15GB media partition.

If you're still rocking the Nexus S, or if you have one resting in a drawer somewhere, you can head over to the source link below for a complete guide on how to flash Android 6.0 Marshmallow on the handset. According to the developer, this is a stable build: the cellular radios, the sensors, the NFC, the Wi-Fi, the Bluetooth, the camera, and the GPS are all said to be working just fine.