AOKP M6 And Beyond, A Message From Its Founder, Roman Birg

As we all know, there are MANY Android users out there who are rooted and it appears that quite a few of you are either running an AOKP(Android Open Kang Project) full-time, or have at least checked one or two of them out in the past. For those of you who swear by AOKP this little bit of news I’m bringing you directly from the AOKP founder, Roman Birg, is specifically for you. However, anyone and everyone should definitely read it to see what the projects founder has to say.

First off is some bad news, but only with regards to a few devices that AOKP won’t be supporting any longer. The list happens to be very short, and the ones listed I would have to agree with the decision to no longer support them. It makes total sense. Here’s the list…

1. HTC Incredible (inc)
2. HTC Desire (bravo)
3. HTC Evo 4G (supersonic)
4. Amazon Kindle Fire (otter)

Here is what Roman had to say with regards to the reasoning behind the decision to retire development of ROM’s for these devices. Very well put and as stated above, I totally agree and understand the logic behind the teams decision.

These devices have a number of problems for our team; first and foremost the fact none of us own any of them.  Beyond that, they’re falling behind in terms of hardware, and maintaining them blindly defeats us before we begin in our goal to create stable releases.  I’ve come to the conclusion that by supporting these devices we’ve overextended ourselves, and the team is in agreement.  Long story short; we can’t release a Milestone build and call it ‘stable’ with these devices in our farm.  The code for these devices will still be in our repos, so anybody who wants to compile them can do so if they wish… they just won’t be receiving “official” builds any longer.  We’re all very sorry about this, but we feel it is necessary for the health of the ROM (and the team making it!).

That’s it for the bad news. Now that wasn’t so bad now was it ? Just a list of 4 devices that won’t be supported any longer by the AOKP project. So I guess that means you’re ready for the good news! But before we get to that stuff…….ok, OK, just kidding. On to the good stuff!!

As many of you know who follow AOKP religiously, they are coming up on M6, short for Milestone 6. As to not type out everything and possibly mess it up or give false hopes, I’m going to quote exactly what Roman had to say.

Milestone 6 is coming! We are shooting for a release sometime this weekend. No promises! We’ve been working for the past few weeks to squash as many bugs as we can.  This will be our final ICS release.

After Milestone 6, the team take a short break in preparation  for Jelly Bean. We’ll be taking a different approach to JB; starting fresh. With a clean start, we’ll be able to set things up properly from the get-go.  We’re a much more experienced unit now,  and we believe merging all of the JB changes is just asking for trouble.

When I started AOKP back in November, I really hadn’t intended on releasing it to more than Nexus devices. AOKP has grown bigger than anyone has expected, most of all me.  It quite literally blew up in my face.  Right now, according to http://stats.aokp.co, there are almost 50,000 devices running AOKP and almost 120,000 devices using some kind of AOKP code-base (aka a KANG). Bear in mind this stats system was implemented only starting with build 39. This is absolutely insane to me!

In closing, Team Kang is just a small group, and AOKP was started for fun.  We aim to keep it fun.  Putting together a feature-rich and buttery-smooth ROM with unrivalled stability is fun both because of our love of doing it and getting to share it with all of you.  Thanks for understanding the things we need to do to keep it that way.

There ya have it folks! Word from the streets, well, better than that actually. That’s word from the big guy, HCIC, project leader/founder or whatever else you wish to call Roman.

So with all that news being delivered, what are your thoughts ? Is the AOKP doing the right thing by retiring the support of those few devices listed above, or do you feel they should continue ? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Roman’s Google+ Post