We don’t know much about Nintendo’s mysterious NX platform. We know that Nintendo is experimenting with various form factors, we know that they are planning on having a unified development pipeline, as well as a unified hardware architecture and OS, and we also know that the online services part will be handled by Japanese mobile company DeNA. Everything else, however, seems to be shrouded in mystery.
However, a new report by Nikkei (translation by duckroll on NeoGAF) states that, according to an insider report, Nintendo’s next system will use Android for its OS. This means not that the system will be an Ouya or Google Play TV like Android microconsole, but that the system will use Android for its frontend UI. Given that Android is a lightweight, user friendly operating system with minimal overhead, and that Nintendo is terrible at designing its own OSs, this might be good news.
Of course, Android is also highly susceptible to piracy, and Nintendo itself is loath to ever relinquish control of its own systems; it is therefore possible that while the frontend UI is Android based, the booter for games themselves is handled by a proprietary Nintendo OS.
Of course, as of right now, all of this remains speculation, but still, it seems that more and more about the NX is slowly coming into focus.