Android Kitkat - The cobranded future of confectionery & Android 4.4

The next version of Android is called Android Kitkat, in a co-branding move with the Nestlé snack. This is why you currently see a giant chocolate Android made by Themendous on the lawn in front of one of the Google Buildings. @Themendous also sent us this image of the Android Kitkat 'baking', and don't you wish that was all chocolate? Don't you?

In a quirky co-branding spot Kitkat explains how their two megabyte (that is "bite", get it?), 4 megayte and 8 megabyte options are all available to fit your breaking needs. Confused? Don't be, this is jut Kitkat's way of telling you that you could win a brand new Nexus 7 or Google credits if you keep an eye out for the Android-branded sweets.

Since Android operating systems have been made all sorts of sweet things from Jelly bean to Ice cream sandwich, a sweet co-branding deal doesn't seem that far-fetched, but who benefits the most from this brand-marriage?

We now have over 1 Billion Android activations and hope this guy in front of the building keeps that momentum going pic.twitter.com/V0VovgmObl

— sundarpichai (@sundarpichai) September 3, 2013

Oddly, nobody is getting paid for this. No money has changed hands between Nestlé and Android, they say. Nestlé is spending money on promoting Android snacks, as if they know a free Nexus 7 giveaway will move more chocolate.

"This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal," John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships, told the BBC.

The brands will now be linked, for better or worse with each other. This does mean that if one brand suffers so will the other. Remember when Greenpeace picked a bloodied orangutang fingered fight with Nestlé over Kitkat? Internally the OS has been called Key Lime Pie, but when it came time to launch the name changed:

"We realised that very few people actually know the taste of a key lime pie," he explained.

"One of the snacks that we keep in our kitchen for late-night coding are KitKats. And someone said: 'Hey, why don't we call the release KitKat?'

"We didn't even know which company controlled the name, and we thought that [the choice] would be difficult. But then we thought well why not, and we decided to reach out to the Nestle folks."

Mr Lagerling said he had made a "cold call" to the switchboard of Nestle's UK advertising agency at the end of November to propose the tie-up.

As you can see from the ad above, Nestlé jumped on the chance to have some fun with it. I predict many silly interlinked promotions in the future, and a iPhone users joking about "breaks" when Android freezes up for any reason. Already used in headlines: Gimme a break: Next Android called KitKat. Even TIME doesn't believe it Google Partners with KitKat (Not a typo).

The name was successfully kept under wraps until launch, and is as you can see already taking many by surprise. With 1 billion downloads, perhaps we can take a break from iOS, and have a look at Android KitKat, see what all the fuss is about.

Nestlés Kitkat is having a great time with this as they revamped their entire website to spoof techlaunch-speak. "Kitkat 4.4 has worldwide standby". Oh yeah.

Android releases Kitkat and everyone suddenly loves Nestlé.

— Adland (@adland) September 3, 2013