Certainly no one believed Apple had intentions of stopping its “thermonuclear” war on Android, but today, things got a little more interesting. On top of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, Apple has also added Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to its list of patent infringements for an upcoming trial taking place in 2014.
It’s not perfectly clear whether Apple is gunning for the Android operating system itself or if it’s Samsung’s Jellified TouchWiz at the moment. Google halted the sales of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus briefly due to Apple’s universal search patent found on the handset a while back, but sales continued shortly afterwards and was apparently pulled for the Jelly Bean upgrade. Even then, the target itself was still Samsung.\
Say that Apple truly goes for Android 4.1 in 2014. The damage will have already been done, because at that point, Google will likely be 2 versions ahead of Jelly Bean. We’re already expecting a Key Lime Pie announcement during the Google I/O conference next year, and if we’re lucky, we’ll see an incremental update at the end of 2013 for the expected launch of the next Nexus handset. By this time next year, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean will more than likely be where Gingerbread is today, more than 50%, and Key Lime Pie just beginning to make headway. Jelly Bean might just be a little under 6 months old, but it will have matured quite a bit by the time the trial comes around.
If we did have to take a guess, we’d probably say that Apple is still going for Samsung with this one, as TouchWiz still bears some remarkable resemblances to its iOS counterpart. Either way, we have a while before we know the verdict, and we can also expect Apple to tack on a few more things to the case before things get going.