I've got nothing to do with this project and only know what I read in the linked article but the seemingly obvious reason they'd use Android phones, especially Nexus phones, is that they run on a nearly fully open source stack (minus some binary drivers), so you can go as deep into the internals as you want without resorting to jailbreaking and/or a lot of reverse engineering.

Wouldn't you still need to root the phone? The stack is definitely more open than on iOS though.

Yeah we do have to root the phones but given the opensource aspirations of the project itself, Android was the most suitable.

Other NASA pages about this project seem to emphasize the "Open source" qualities of the project. There's also language like "with the goal of allowing anyone with space ambitions to launch their own satellite".

For instance, most other major options (elephant in the room being Apple), have onerous terms for their accessory development kits which would preclude that. Last I checked, Apple even keep the Dock port pinout "confidential" from people not in their accessory dev program, which would be a show-stopper since presumably this uses the dock/USB port for control.

I imagine the comment about having a "versatile operating system" has something to do with it.

My guess is the same reason ArduSat uses phone hardware.

All the sensors one might want on a Satellite (motions sensors, cameras, magnetic field detection) are all built into phones now. Android (or more to the point Android's Linux kernel) is specifically compiled to be compatible with most of that hardware. So less work for them as opposed to using another version of Linux.

What else would they use? It seems pretty obvious to go with Android.

NASA flies a lot with VxWorks. They could have ported it to the nexus.

At which point the satellites can no longer be open source. Perhaps more importantly, Android already runs on the Nexus S; VxWorks doesn't. It defeats the purpose of using commodity hardware if you start over from scratch on the software running it.

I agree VxWorks would require additional porting effort. I also think that Android was the right choice for this mission.

I'm not sure I agree with the implied high priority placed on open source. The relative development costs of android, real-time linux, or even a commerical RTOS are noise in the flight software development budget. Reducing the cost is a more important driver to making space more accessible.

The big benefit, if these android cube sats fly successfully, would be to retire a lot of risks - thus opening the door for future programs to fly with android.

Between the cheapness and flexibility of Android it makes it a pretty obvious choice, no?