Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - CyanogenMod and the Death of the Android ROM

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Today we've got another special episode! Don't worry, there will be another regular episode on Friday. In today's episode David tries to find out what happened to Android ROMming? There was a time when flashing the latest nightly on your phone had an entire community built around it, but those days disappeared.. rather suddenly. What happened? We investigate. Special thanks to: Mishaal Rahman: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman Rich Miner: https://twitter.com/richminer Stefanie Kondik: https://twitter.com/cyanogen Lineage OS team: https://lineageos.org/ Links: Rich Miner History of Android: https://bit.ly/richminerhistoryofandroid ZTE article: https://bit.ly/ztetradeban Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Book with your local travel advisor or at... us. We've been here since last year's sale. Hey, get away from my fries. Oh yeah, book with your local travel advisor or at... What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back. I know this is a midweek episode, but it's a bonus episode, and it's another another long form episode. Do the air horns. That's right. That's right. We all love a long form episode. Anyway,

uh, we're back. Well, we, we will have our regular scheduled programming at the end of the week as usual. Um, but just wanted to peek in this little bonus episode for you guys. So you guys excited?

I'm very excited. Very excited. It's been a minute since we did the last one. Thanksgiving right now. Thankful for a long form episode. Oh yeah. I'm very excited. Very excited. It's been a minute since we did the last one. Thanksgiving right now. Thankful for a long form episode. Oh yeah. I'm always thankful for a long form episode. So to spice up this episode, there is trivia throughout.

Yeah. You never know when you might hear this sound. Okay. That's the trivia sound? That's the trivia sound.'s the trivia sound just like throughout the episode okay it'll be happening throughout the story anytime that david mentions something i might just play this and there will be a trivia question that you guys have to answer okay you will win something at the end oh this is not going towards our regular trivia no no no no because then david wouldn't get it yeah there's just just for this episode that was my chance to catch up yeah there is

you will win something but to spice it up a little bit you guys are both starting with 20 points okay and every time you hear once again this sound can i you can bet wager you can wager points based on how confident you are about what was just being discussed we hear the question okay so we hear what's being discussed we wager and then we hear the actual question of it exactly cool so i'm pushing all in every time i'm pushing zero every time so david's talking talking he's telling a story, telling a story, and then all of a sudden, and you guys place your bets, David asks a question, and there we go. This is going to be like in school when the teacher calls and you're like, I just zoned out for the last five minutes. I'm going to be laser focused now.

Lasered in. You got to snap at me if you see me drifting. Yeah, all right. So I think we're just going to get right into it. if he's drifting yeah yeah all right so i think we're just gonna get right into it and as usual in the way that we get into these things we got to start with a lot of context history lesson that's right okay so we're diving we're diving back pretty far into the past to start it off do you guys know the website xda developersers? Of course. I do. Yeah? Of course. What would you say XDA Developers is?

XDA, man. I mean, that's kind of like the OG forums of, I mean, I associate it with Android. So forums for developers, software, ROMs, tweaking phones, all these types of fun things. I was much more in XDA back in, I want to say, like, the 2009 to 2015 sort of years. Yeah, so that era between Android being birthed and now. And being what it is today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Well, that's right. XDA currently, and was before, a very big ROMing site. For those who don't know what it means, what roaming means, it's a website where you can go and you can take your devices that you're using on a day to day basis, and dive really deep into modifying the software for those devices, right? Roaming is kind of a weird term, right? Because ROM stands for read only memory. And, you know, you're installing a custom ROM, you're not like, installing custom-only memory onto your device.

It doesn't really make sense. But it's just basically a term that came about because people are installing modified software onto the not actually read-only memory parts of their device. But it's just kind of a thing that came about because they were installing things to a place where you're not meant to modify the software, the storage. That's Mashal Rahman. He wrote for XDA for a very long period of time. And he's kind of known as the guy around the internet

who digs into Android code and finds all the new features and stuff. Nice. Yeah. You guys probably have met him before, right? I don't know if I've met him, but I've definitely seen that work. Yeah.

Where every time there's a new version of Android code that drops, somebody has gone through the code and found the newest references to things and it becomes an article for every feature yeah i'm into that yeah i feel like i know xda much more nowadays as the website that people like him post the real nitty gritty of things and i'm sure we've talked about stuff he's written yeah dozens of times definitely he does really deep dives into android stuff do you guys actually know what xda and xda developers is supposed to refer to oh this feels like a trivia question uh i was waiting for this sound

uh is it really no it's not oh okay d does d stand for developer no because that would be two no developers twice yeah i don't know what does it stand for does x stand for xylophone no that's all I got. Do you have any guesses or no? I have zero guesses. Okay. So XDA is actually relating to the O2 XDA. O2 is a telecommunications carrier in Europe.

And they had these like PDAs that they called XDAs because they were like extra or cool. I don't know. You sub out anything with X and it just sounds a lot cooler. Of course. X with an x yeah pda but with an x okay yeah it was very much like an early form of the smartphone like we don't necessarily consider those devices smartphones they were pdas even though personally i think that we should call smartphones now pdas because they are personal digital assistants more than they are just smart versions of phones. Yeah, that's funny because now the phone part is the least used part. So these people want to mess around with these XDA phones, right? They were these early PDAs that were a lot different from modern smartphones, mostly because they were like really closed down.

They all ran Windows Mobile and it wasn't very modifiable so these people wanted to modify them so they're just like tweaking and trying to get performance benefits out of it and this group kind of comes together to start sharing all of these tweaked kernels and roms that they're making right speaking of which all right adam play the music trivia question number one in 2003 this group of xda developers started tweaking around with their xda phones adding features and all this stuff what european city was this happening in a london b barcelona c oslo or d amsterdam i guess i would like to wager five of my points i would like to wager do i get to hear

the question again because i already know all the answers okay i'll wager five okay okay yeah are we pointing to the camera all right flip them and read what do you got i said oslo i said barcelona to both dang it the answer was d Oh. All right. So now you both have 15 points. Okay. All these little XDA developers get together in Amsterdam and they're modifying their Windows Mobile PDAs, which they call XDAs. And they figure,

we can't be the only ones that want to do this, right? There's got to be a lot of people. There's a lot of nerds on the planet that have these PDAs. And they're probably also modifying them and none of us are talking to each other, right? It's almost like the Secret History of the Internet episode where everyone realized they could be talking to each other. Yeah.

And like learning more because one, everyone's doing separate things and getting to there. If you can skip the first five steps. Exactly. Because someone's done it already. You can share information. So they decided to launch this website called XDA Developers, a site to mess with software and all this stuff.

This ended up being a huge hit really fast. They grew to 100,000 members in three years, which is wild. And keep in mind, this is just the O2 XDA phones. One carrier, one type of PDA, and they get to 100,000 people that want to tweak their devices in three years. That's actually kind of incredible. Right? And back in the day, too, that's a lot.

Yeah, that's between 2003 and 2006. Okay. Yeah, which is wild. Now, all of these XDA devices were made by one company, this company called High Tech Computer Corporation. That's a horrible name. Is it? High Tech Computer Corporation. That's a horrible name. Is it?

High Tech Computer. They should rename it. I mean, maybe it is a good name. It's just very literal. Maybe they should like shorten it. What's the acronym for that? Maybe like High Tech. Wait, hold on.

Let me try. High Tech Computer. HTC, baby! Oh, yeah. That's a great idea. Okay, so they shorten it. Is that what that means? High Tech Computer Corporation. HTC is that's a great idea okay so they shortened it is that what that means? high tech computer corporation

HTC's way better without ever pretending that that's what it meant yeah for the nerds out there HTC doesn't really make phones anymore but they have made some of the best smartphones of the era so yeah really old school HTC stuff being made back then

this kind of showed the scale at which people wanted to modify their devices, right? There's this quote from Bill Joy, who is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, that all the smartest people don't work for us. They work for somebody else. And XDA kind of showed that was the case, right? Because they were launching these, well, XDA developers showed that was the case. Because they were launching these XDA PDAs, and these people were just adding all these features on top and they were just like making them run faster and they were making them do this and it's like why couldn't the company just do that because they don't have all the smartest people who are the most excited in the background

of all this in the background radiation of silicon valley there's a man named rich minor of silicon valley there's a man named rich minor he's working at orange ventures um and if you don't know orange is another telecom company uh in europe similar to like verizon or at&t uh and rich's company at the time was called wildfire communications it was this very early form of basically siri yeah do you know about this company you seem like you know about this company this might be a total coincidence but there was a phone called the hdc wildfire does that have anything to do with this i don't know okay that's the only reason it sounded familiar i doubt it wildfire i doubt it um yeah like crazy enough the wildfire ended up being what a lot of people consider like the godfather of siri it was a very early digital assistant um from 1994 voice-based

assistant oh 94 which is crazy siri's had that long and still sucks this best yeah exactly um wait david not to interrupt you but i can come in with a confirmation that the hdc wildfire is not named after wildfire communications but in the most 2011 turn of events ever it was named by a facebook poll 2011 man what a time what a time so rich sells wildfire communications to orange um and he became an Orange employee. And they bought it because they wanted to offer this personal digital assistant voice assistant to their subscribers. Little fun fact, they shut it down in a couple of years because no one was using it. But because he was acquired by Orange, he became this Orange employee, and he quickly joined the Orange Ventures team. quickly joined the orange ventures team and uh a lot of these big corporations have these venture arms that just allow them to like invest in other companies that would be good for the company right

and over the next couple of years uh all of the sort of like smart pda phones that are coming out are windows mobile phones and windows mobile phones and Windows mobile phones. Somebody's got to do something about this. Yeah, exactly. And I just got a little worried when we were doing that because I felt like, boy, if Microsoft owns the mobile phone space, we're going to repeat some of the things that we saw in the laptop space where there's one word processor

one spreadsheet like it felt like we might not have an innovative platform if if the platform is tight controlled and that's rich minor uh we got him on the phone for this story now because rich is working at orange ventures um he has the opportunity to invest in some companies for orange right because he kept seeing these Windows mobile devices pop up over and over and over again. He starts to get really interested in device diversity of operating systems because he just didn't want the same thing that happened in personal computing where everything got consolidated to like, you've got IBM and you've got Apple and Windows releases Windows and you can only use one application.

Like, it's just not a good time, right? So he's like, okay, if these PDAs are like early smartphones are growing out, we need to make sure that there's a lot of competition. I don't just want to see 2.0 of the same thing. So he's at Orange Ventures and he gets interested in projects like SavaJE. I think it's supposed to be pronounced savage um but it's a it's an early like java based os for for devices like this basically any os that could create richer mobile experiences that were already available um and one of the companies that

really caught his interest was this company called danger who made a device called the Danger Hip Top, also known as... How much do you guys want to wager? Danger Hip Top? Yeah, the Danger Hip Top was the other more popular name for that device. You guys both have 15 points. I'll wager two points.

You're going to start wagering lower. Yeah, I'm wagering one point. One point. All right. All right. You ready? What do you think it is? Danger, say that again?

Danger Hip Top. What do I think it is? The more common name for the Danger Hip Top. Pretty sure this was already a trivia question. Is it really? I don't even know what to write alright flip them and read laptop

and beeper nope this is a device by a company called danger right so it was also called the sidekick the t-mobile sidekick that was called the hip top the hip top i knew that t-mobile sidekick 2 with phone web im and more so danger seemed like a cool uh and smart choice to fund because they were doing something really new and cool right like everyone really liked the sidekick did you ever do you guys ever use a sidekick i just saw them on tv all the time and i wanted they did pop off weren't they like a t-mobile exclusive or something yeah t-mobile sidekick i never owned a sidekick but i did get to try them and play with them in a little

satisfying flip yeah they're cool there were multiple generations of them um there's a really awesome mr mobile when phones were fun retrospective on the Sidekick and Sidekick 1 through like 4, which is really dope. You should watch that. Anyway, Rich decided he's going to invest in Danger through Orange Ventures. And he's working pretty closely with them. Because around that time, one of the guys that was running Danger was named Andy Rubin. Heard of it.

Yeah. They had been building this OS for the Danger hip-top RT Mobile Sidekick because it had its own OS, this Danger OS. And it was cool. And the OS for the Sidekick was pretty innovative. Like, it was very different from all the, like, Windows mobile offerings at the time, you know? And so Danger decided, and yet Danger was like, I kind of want to make another OS. And I don't know. It's probably one of those things where, like, you make one, you just want to make something else.

You want to do it again and again and again, right? And so what was the OS that Andy was originally going to make supposed to be made for type of device? Marques, you have 13. Andrew, you got 14. What was it supposed to be made for? I know this. How much do you guys want to wager?

Two points. Two points? That's it? You really don't remember? No. I don't. If this was multiple choice, I would get this. Oh, man.

I have to go one point because I don't know it right now. Remember, it's Andy Rubin. Yeah. You know Andy Rubin. Yeah, Andy Rubin. Andy, a.k.a. Android Rubin. Yeah. Andy Rubin's the guy Andy Rubin. Andy, a.k.a. Android Rubin. Yeah.

Andy Rubin's the guy that produced the Beastie Boys. What was Android for? Oh, no. Time's running down. No pressure. I know I'm wrong because he's thinking so hard and guessing something very like what feels obvious i'm gonna flip him and read hearing this out loud i know it i just wrote tablet you write airplane i wrote appliance oh don't remember i was i hope it's airplane um okay so we got this rich, rich minor quote.

So Andy had this kind of idea of OSs for mobile devices. He actually started thinking about an OS for camera. He originally started thinking about making this OS for a camera. Yeah, me too. And then he was like oh no it shouldn't be about the phone and I agreed yes we need an open OS for the phone so I'd invested in danger as a part of the venture fund I'd

started at Orange talked to Andy about what he was doing with Android and and had my thesis about why I thought we needed and carriers needed and OEMs needed an open mobile phone OS as opposed to a tightly controlled mobile phone OS as opposed to a tightly controlled mobile phone OS like we might get with Nokia, like you might get with Microsoft.

Rich was like, yes, we definitely need an OS for phones, right? This is kind of an aside, but do you guys realize how much it sucked to be a developer back in the like PDA feature phone days? An OS developer or an app developer? An app developer. No. feature phone days an os developer or an app an app developer no you couldn't just like upload your app to an open marketplace you had to like go to individual carriers because a lot of carriers had phones that only came out on that carrier like the o2 xda or the t-mobile sidekick to make carriers you had to go to t-mobile and you had to say hey we're building this app that does this thing do you think you could maybe put it on the t-mobile side can we be bloatware

please yeah and then t-mobile yeah would basically be bloatware and then t-mobile would be like well what's in it for us yeah that's terrible yeah it sucks there's like no way to like how are you going to be incentivized to build apps if that's the process that you have to go through that's awful so rich and andy are sort of also thinking about like how do we like encourage development here because it sucks to have the carriers have all of the control we really need to push this through so rich gets really hyped about android because he's like yeah open os we should make an open os we should make this os that doesn't just like you don't build this os for this particular phone that goes on

a particular carrier you build an os that can be used on multiple things so that you don't just have HTC phones, or you don't just have danger phones, you know, you can just make it for everything. And everyone can just build their own apps, and it all works. And it's open source and all this stuff. And so he gets hyped about this, he joins in the Android team as a co founder. this he joins in the android team as a co-founder and they start getting uh to work on android for the next two years or so in 2005 they're out trying to raise money for the company because they have to make money so they're looking for their series a um and for those that don't know when you're a startup you can go around and get different rounds or series of funding it's basically like we're building this thing. Do you want to invest?

Like if you invest, it basically keeps us around because we have to pay our employees, all this stuff. So Andy and Rich aren't actually looking for Android to get like acquired. They just thought that it would be really dope to have this open OS so they could go to HTC and they could go to Samsung and they could go to LG and Motorola and be like, you guys should use our OS and you can like pay us to use it, licensing fees and stuff. But Android, the company, the OS maker is a separate corporation. They didn't really want to like be acquired. They just wanted to raise funding.

And they ended up going to Google to kind of see like, you know, if they could have a Google phone that used the Android OS, that would be pretty dope for their pitch deck. Because Google was already a huge company at this point in time. And they could go around and it would be a lot easier for like them to get Samsung or HTC or Motorola interested. And we actually found this YouTube video on the internet where Rich says, And as we went out and started to pitch we were happened to be a google google was already funding um the mozilla open source project at that point in time it was kind of this thing where like a lot of the companies were funding these open source projects because they didn't want like microsoft or any of these other giant tech corporations to have all the ownership and stuff. Because if you fund open source, then there's a lot more competition and it's not all consolidated.

Right. So Google had been going around and already trying to like help open source kind of get underway. So Google was like, yeah, no, you need some help with that. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to buy you. So things start moving really fast after that. Remember, this is still 2005 and and andy and rich on the team are building the thing there's actually a really great book by chet has um i recommend called androids the team that built the android operating system um that kind of details like the

early years of them building this but then two years later it's 2007 do you guys remember what happened in 2007 i do do you want to wager that oh just name something that happened just name anything that happens in 2007 i'll wager all my what was what was the biggest thing that happened in tech in 2007 i'll wager everything i got marquez you have 12 so you're wagering it all i'm wagering 12. Andrew you also have 12. how much are you wagering oh 12. all right wait they're going deep in you got it you're going all for it they're all in they're all in let's see if it would be a shame if I'm wrong because I don't have any points left yeah what happens when if we're both at zero I'll have to rethink the game spy back in i'll buy back in all right you ready flip them and read boys oh thank goodness iphone the iphone that's right boys an ipod a phone

and an internet communicator an ipod a phone An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one and we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. It's funny because when you were talking about this before, I was like, how can we get more things developing for it? I was like, we're getting pretty close to the iPhone iphone also where does that come in yeah right so the iphone gets launched and google's like in the background they're developing android they had been developing android for two years but yeah so it was already like in process and they're like okay um we need to turn up the heat because apple just launched this major thing. And so the public beta of Android 1.0 launched on November 5th, 2007,

which was like immediately after a couple of months later, a couple of months later. Yeah. Cause they were like, it doesn't matter that it's not done yet. We just need to put out a beta for it so that people start developing for it because we need to get this in the hands of people and it needs to have an app store and all this stuff a very googly thing to do yeah and yeah send it exactly yeah yeah it's

actually kind of their motto in 2007 it's kind of what apple is now doing with division pro it's kind of what google is doing with bard what microsoft's doing with we don't really you don't really build on top of bard though i guess the whole oh it's it's kind of happening right now we need to send it oh yeah moment yeah yeah true true but yeah i feel you yeah the vision pro thing is like this isn't out yet but we need apps when it is out so please develop now right right that's kind of what google was doing because they didn't have an advice there was no android phone you just had to do it on a computer. Yeah.

You know, so that launched on November 5th, 2007. And the first official Android phone launched in September 2008. And what was that phone? Everything I got. I'm just four. Andrew, I hear 24 points. You're risking it all. Four. I'm risking 20 of my 24 there are two common names for this device and i will accept both

i'm gonna be mad mad if this is right but i think it's wrong i think i'm missing something beforehand interesting okay and i know marquez is that right flip them and read marquez says hdc slash t-mobile g1 correct and i said hdc iris no but that's okay they really gave that phone both a trackball and a keyboard i had the eris full send the g1 that's the full trackball yeah trackball and it had a slot out not a slide but a slot out screen yeah it was a weird mechanism it was awesome it was a hinge it was pretty sick yeah it was cool i wanted one so bad so android's officially out and on a phone in September 2008, just a year after the iPhone launches, even though it had been developed in the background since 2005. Actually, kind of since 2003. Now, I want to flip it back to XDA for a second.

Keep in mind that they were founded specifically as a Windows mobile modding blog for the O2XDA and the O2XDA only, which is wild. But there was writing on the wall, right? Like Microsoft is kind of the last company that wants you to modify their OS anyway. So it was very difficult to modify these O2 phones. And then this new OS comes out from google of all companies which is the huge tech company that is kind of founded on being open sourced and modified like everyone on xda wants to just move to that right that makes a lot of sense so i found a couple of different sources for this um but there's a blog post from xDA Developers from 10 years ago called The History of XDA Developers, which is funny considering it's from 10 years ago.

And it says that it took until 2009, the next year, for XDA to realize that they should be allowing Android phones on the forums because it was originally just for Windows mobile phones. But if you look back, there were people developing for the HTC Dream T-Mobile G1 pretty much immediately after it came out. I forgot it was called the Dream also. HTC Dream, baby. Yeah. Anyway, as soon as that comes out, it just starts buzzing. The Android development is going. And there's kind of this idea that they had to rush it out

because of the iPhone anyway, so it was kind of unfinished. So all these developers get their G1s, and they're just like, Kind of this idea that like they had to rush it out because of the iPhone anyway. So it was kind of unfinished, you know? So all these developers get their G1s and they're just like, we can modify this. We can make it amazing. And we're allowed to. Yeah, we're allowed to do it. Encouraged even. No, I mean, Android was awesome, right?

Like the iPhone when it first came out was really expensive. It didn't have an app store. It was super locked down. And then you have this other option where you were encouraged to modify your device. There was this awesome like launch phone that came out that everyone was buying it was super cool for for perspective the modifying and the iphone software was called jailbreaking yeah that's how locked up it was yeah it was pretty locked up yeah jail right yeah yeah um and all of a sudden all of these roms start getting put on xda right because when you take android and you start modifying it yourself you can call that your own rom you know you're you're making it look the way you want you're adding the features that you want it's

not like all these people on xda are like working on one project they're working on a bunch of different projects so there's all of these different roms coming out there's slim roms there's paranoid android there's dirty unicorns i use both of that's right that's right those are some throwbacks there's throwbacks i know yeah and people are like people are just flashing stuff every single day right like that and keep in mind when you flash a new rom to your phone it completely wipes your phone of all apps and all memory and all photos and all data this was a time that i got really good at setting up new phones. Because I was flashing new ROMs and new updates.

Like every time there was a new dot version update of like Paranoid Android, I'd flash a new kernel, new ROM like every couple of days. Yeah. Totally wipe everything. There were some ROMs that were bigger that had teams that were working on them that would do nightlies. Yep. So they would add new features every single night. And in the morning you would wake up and you would flash your phone and it would wipe all of your data.

And you'd have some slight performance boosts. Yeah. And it'd be awesome. It was awesome. It was sick. But there was one ROM that would kind of change the way that we thought about Android ROMing overall. And the drama that would unfold because of this ROM in the tech world was legendary. I love this drama.

This drama is epic. But we'll get to it after the break. This episode is brought to you by RBC Student Banking. Here's an RBC student offer that turns a feel-good moment into a feel-great moment. Students, get $100 when you open a no-monthly-fee RBC Advantage banking account, and we'll give another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more, only at RBC. Visit rbc.com slash get 100, give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025. Complete offer eligibility

criteria by March 31st, 2025. Choose one of five eligible charities. Up to $500,000 in total contributions. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. Welcome back to continue our story. It's 2008. The HTC Dream T-Mobile G1 just came out. And in November of 2008, which again is like immediately after the T-Mobile G1 come out,

this username Jesus Freak emerged on XDA. Nice. But Freak is spelled F-R-E-K-E, which do you know what that means? No. What is freaking? What does freaking mean? What does freaking mean?

But F-R-E-K-E. How much do you guys want to wager? I'll wager four points. I will wager one point. Flashing a ROM? No. Mine's so vague that it's probably not right. You're probably right.

I wrote modding. No. No? Okay. He was ready to say no so phone freaking uh is something that people used to do with pay phones where they would play sounds into the pay phone which would allow them to make free phone calls because each number is a specific tone it's a tone right and all it is is listening you didn't have to pay you didn't have

to pay for the the phone if you were able to play the right sounds into the phone. Because all that's happening on a pay phone is you're picking it up and it's listening. And when you dial those numbers... You can turn the speaker on. Andrew, that's how any dialing of a phone works. Really? Yeah, like it's using the actual... Like my smartphone right now. Ellis' quick audio lesson.

On a nine-button phone, or I guess there's 12 buttons, the rows are all one tone and the columns are all one tone. So it's actually each button is playing two tones in harmony decided by the coordinates. The frequency interaction between those tones is picked up at the other end and it is connected to a logic board that puts it all together. It's all sonic. So you can dial a phone just by putting a speaker up to a phone and playing this is only like landline only land because i think a lot of people listening right now phone

means very different what's the landline there are some people alive who think they can do this on their smartphone that's not what i'm talking about but i literally have never i can't believe i've never heard they used to make these little devices and you could go up to a payphone and like call someone by just playing into the payphone for free that's hilarious yeah it was epic wow anyway yeah jesus freak which was a fun little play on words unreal yeah so this user emerged on xda as the quickly as the maintainer of the most popular Android ROM at the time. And again, the HTC Dream came out in October of 2008. He was the most popular one on XDA by November of 2008.

So he spent all of his time just immediately going and ROMing this phone, right? And this is people just in their free time. It's not like a full time job. This is just because you wanted to there's no you're not getting paid to mod on on xda yeah right he's got this quote he basically says that uh he pre-ordered his g1 so he was one of the first people to get one and he sort of had to play this cat and mouse game because there was this infamous root bug that didn't allow him to have root access so he had to try to figure out how to patch that bug to give him root access and then he got root access and then they updated it and

it took away root access and so he just starts basically going back and forth but he had this awesome rom out called jf rom that everyone just started using for the g1 by the way root on your phone means that you have access to the root directory which is this primary folder where like everything is stored from and the reason that you usually don't the root directory, which is this primary folder where everything is stored from. And the reason that you usually don't have root access on a device is because if you delete system32 on your computer, it's like the primary folder that everything else branches from. You can break everything with root access.

You can just break everything with root access. Which we've all done from time to time. Yeah. And then in May 2009, Jesus Freak was hacking away, making JF ROM, and this user named Cyanogen made their first blog post on

XDA with the title Cyanogen Mod, optimizing the crap out of Android 1.5 release 2. And effectively, they were just making a bunch of modifications to Jesus Freaks ROM and enhancing it. They were forking the ROM.

Interesting. So they didn't fork Android, they forked Jesus Freaks ROM. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah, that's why it's called Android, right? They've got Android Open Source Project, JF ROM, another fork, CyanogenMod. Got it.

So the user's name was Cyanogen, and their ROM was called CyanogenMod. You know, it's just like, you know, what I found is this huge project that has all these cool things that you can hack on. And, you know, it's open source. And with a little bit of work, you could build it for this phone and actually like run it and use it every day. So that's Stephanie Kondik, aka The Cyanogen. We were finally able to get in touch

with her for this episode. It was very hard to track her down. But thanks to Shen for getting us in contact. Wow, shout out to Shen. Yeah, if you don't know who Shen is, he works at HTC on Vive and he seems to know literally everyone. Somehow.

Been on the show before also. been on the show before also been on the show before he's a really awesome guy he knows everyone that is shen right there if uh audio listeners we have a giant cardboard cut out of shen but a quick trivia question what was shen's first job how much do you guys want to wager are you saying like first job ever um first job to know what shem's first job was first job on his linkedin on his linkedin dog walker i have no idea uh do you guys want a hint i would i just told you wagering after that sure sure do they have to wager for this this is really hard hint sounds great yeah he's told me before oh we've been talking about it on and off this entire time

yeah okay i'll go with what i was gonna guess then okay i'll wager two points two points andrew i'll wager two points you know you're like marquez has 40 and and'm wrong but i want it to be right i really want to know what you wrote now all right you ready flip them and read them and read oh you're a moderator xda moderator xda developer reporter i'll do both yeah he was uh the xda tv producer from oh what yeah right tv producer producer yeah i used to watch xda tv videos yeah he produced them yeah oh whoa is that insane anyway that was a quick aside um more stephanie quotes i don't know for like somebody who's an engineer, you know, I hate whenever I have a product that like there's a bug in it and I can't fix it.

Like, I wish, you know, like I can help you with this. Please let me. You know, I mean, I understand why the world doesn't work that way, unfortunately, but maybe it could be better if it did. At the time, everything was really new. So things performed really poorly, to say the least, right? There were there was a lot of things that you could do to increase the performance. So, you know, I knew a lot about that from like working on like data center systems and stuff like that. And, you know, like really like tuning Linux and all that. So, you know, I just really kind of dug in there and tried to make something that went faster and felt like a nicer thing to use. You could just make it better.

Yeah, you just make it better. You just make it better. It's like this, but just like make it better. Yeah, right. So especially if you're an engineer and you're just like using these products and they just have all these issues and it's like you could just, you just want to be able to do that, but that company doesn't let you mess with it.

That's frustrating. So then you get Android and it's amazing. You can just make your device better. You can just do whatever you want to it. So Jesus Freak and Cyanogen are kind of working on their own stuff. CyanogenMod was a fork of the JF ROM and then JF ROM was its own little thing. And then on August 20th of 2009, JesusFreak

decides it's a little too much work. He just kind of calls it quits. He's like, I just don't want to do this anymore. I'm kind of bored. But he does do one last thing on his way out. He recommends that everyone using his ROM, which remember was the most popular ROM for the G1 on XDA

developers, move over to cyanogen mod i remember that yeah i was gonna say you mentioned drama before and i assumed the drama was going to stem from one mod coming up so much off of one that was there okay no it's the opposite it's kind of the opposite they're friendly happy they're friends yeah yeah yeah they're friends so from here cyanogen mod just starts growing super fast. Stephanie publishes the whole thing to GitHub so other people can add to it and mess with it, right? Because usually it's just one person updating it and you download that, but then she puts on GitHub

so then people can fork it. They can add things to the core build and everyone just starts kind of jumping on this unofficial team. And I'm responsible for this feature and maintaining this phone and you're responsible for maintaining this phone it was kind of cool because there would just be new phones that come out you're one of the first people to buy it you're like oh i really want to get cyanogen mod on this oh it's not available yet i'm going to be the

person on xda that maintains cyanogen mod for this device yeah and it was just no one's getting heroes heroes unsung heroes absolutely the heroes of my college career exactly i love those people yeah so this is going the community's thriving everything's great um i just remember loving loving the ramen community so much because everyone's so friendly you could just flash all these different roms and it was it was amazing uh but then in 2009 there was this event that happened that the media dubbed cyanogate and basically cyanogen got a cease and desist letter from google which is scary and stephanie starts freaking out right she's like damn this could be the end i'm scared like maybe i should shut this down like imagine

you and a bunch of friends are just kind of like doing this fun project for no reason and then some company comes out of the gate and sends you a cease and desist letter yeah like if you had a website called league of legos and then just like yeah company just yeah i on the other hand never did anything with the website but cyanogen mod was a real thing uh but basically the problem and the reason that google sent them to cease and desist letter was that they were distributing google apps specifically the android market um and this one thing happened where cyanogenmon had distributed a newer version of android market version 1.6 before google even publicly released it do you know how that happened because it gets put in uh aosp but google had not put it like on a device yet and so they were really upset about that

okay yeah that's understandable can i hop in here yeah boys um it's important to note that at this point in history there's a very very very murky line between aosp like the android open source project and then google apps right at this point, Google Apps are getting shipped on every version of the open source Android project. But whether or not Google Apps are open source themselves is not clear. That was defined. I remember that moment. It was very unclear. And so basically this lawyer just comes and is like, hey, it's against our terms of service to ship our apps, right?

Because AOSP is open source and you can ship to aosp but you can't be shipping google apps very youtube gmail gmail calendar google play store yeah apple or app store sorry android marketplace android marketplace at the android market market sorry yeah so stephanie ended up working with google on this they did talk it through it ended up working with Google on this. They did talk it through. It ended up not being as scary as she thought it was going to be. Like she thought it was, that was the end. They were going to shut her down, but it kind of was just a like, stop like distributing

our apps, but like, we're not going to stop you from making your ROM, like keep doing your thing. So it's at that point in time where every time you ROMed something or you flashed a ROM, you had to both install the ROM and you had to sideload something called the GAPS, which is the Google Apps Package. Yeah. So you would flash this ROM onto your phone, but you didn't have any Google Play services or any Google Apps, so it was kind of useless. So you had to force the Google Apps onto your phone so that you could have Google Play services, you could use Gmail and Google Maps and all of this different stuff.

So many memories. Yeah, it was a whole process. It got a little bit harder to ROM your phone. It just took longer. It was just two flashes instead of one. It was two flashes instead of one. Yeah, it wasn't a big deal. So luckily, Google kind of left CyanogenMod alone after that.

They hadn't gone after any of the other ROM developers, but CyanogenMod at that point was the biggest. So they kind of just made an example out of them. And Stephanie says like, it was probably just like one lawyer that just got a little trigger happy, you know, just needed something to do. I mean, like my heart definitely sank

whenever I got it. Why are they coming after us? Like, you know, this is like a, you know, like, you know, we're helping them. People from the community are like, you know know submitting all this code back to google and you know we are like you know we're creating features that they're like copying and including and you know in in android later on and stuff that was what struck me the most because i remember there would be features that you'd see in cyanogen mod or some random mod and then one and a half versions later

that would show up in Android whether it was lock screen shortcuts or little settings tweaks or something like that I would see that I'm very confident I made a video about how that kept happening how these modifications of Android just kept getting swallowed into what Google would ship

it's kind of like Sherlocking right yeah we're just going to take your ideas because all the smartest people don't work for us. But we don't have to do the bleeding edge modifications ourselves. We can just see what catches on. And then once one of them catches on well enough,

then we're like, all right, it seems like people really like this. There's kind of a lot, but they work through it. They keep moving on with CyanogenMod. Kind of out of nowhere, Stephanie lost her job, which was kind of rough for her. But she ended up moving to Seattle because she got a call from no one other than Jesus Freak. Jesus Freak was working for Samsung at the time and a couple of other people that had been maraming on XDA.

Interesting. And he's like, hey, we're doing this work for Samsung. They kind of have us in this like innovation zone. Samsung they've they kind of have us in this like innovation zone and this was like the peak point of the Samsung versus iPhone kind of fight when it was like the Samsung phones were really the flagship Android phones right so Samsung was like we need to like work up our our war chest against Apple we have to come up with as many features as possible so that people really want to use Samsung phones. So they basically just recruited a bunch of the modders from the XDA forums. That's not a bad idea.

Which is a pretty smart thing to do. Super smart. Yeah, and I think that this is actually one of the reasons why Samsung OS, Samsung mod, not mods, Samsung's OS has like a zillion features that you never really use. Right? mods samsung's os has like a zillion features that you never really use right there are videos all over the internet of like all of the things that one one ui has that you had no idea you could do that's built into one ui and i think a lot of those are a result of these xda people grabbing tons of people to come in and work for them yeah for anything that'll stick yeah yeah just make anything that'll stick it's really awesome a year into this stephanie is still working on cyanogen mod in her free time i still have no idea how she managed to like work full-time for samsung and do cyanogen mod every night

and put out nightlies every night i guess i'm also surprised samsung's letting her do that right like if i were samsung i'd be like i want all of your best stuff yeah right here yeah under we asked her about that and she said that it was just kind of a like we don't talk about it kind of thing okay yeah which is cool that's the coolest samsung's ever sounded i know wow well this was like back in like galaxy s3 days yeah yeah so she's working for samsung and she's running cyanogen mod at the same time but she said uh she gets this call from this man named Carl Pay out of nowhere. Never heard of him. And she also gets a call from a man named Kurt McMaster.

So you guys probably know Carl Pay. He's somehow still in the vernacular of the tech scene because he runs a company called Nothing. That man stays relevant he stays irrelevant yeah uh at the time he was this upper manager guy for oppo and he calls up stephanie and he's like what do you think about making a phone that has cyanogen mod as the os and i think that he was just like this would be really a community focused thing could be really cool like we can make a cyanogen phone she'd actually been wanting to make a cyanogen first phone specifically because

you would look at the iphone and you see that it's like it's this full stack phone right apple is making the os and the hardware and you really want to be able to build things into hardware and stephanie had been frustrated that she couldn't build cyanogenmon through the hardware she didn't have control of that she only had control of the software. And it was like on all these phones and you could only do so much with like third-party hardware, right? So they start this conversation and they start to work together. And they end up making a limited edition phone that is running CyanogenMod for the Chinese market. What was the name of that phone?

How much do you guys want to wager? 10 points. And remember, this is Carl Pei who was working at Oppo at the time. If that gives you a little heads up. And also remember, you know, this phone had a non-cyanogen version too. Yeah.

They just also managed to... They wanted to make a special edition. I reviewed this phone, so I should be more confident about this. You did. Andrew, how much are you... Andrew, how much are you? Andrew, how much are you? Five.

Five. Five. I'm like half sure. I'm half sure. Well, the thing I'm half sure about, I'm also half sure if that's the correct thing. And then I also think there might be something other than this okay if i think i'm gonna i think i know what you wrote based on okay i want to hear yeah we both have our end up what do you think i wrote i think you wrote oppo find

one no okay i wrote one plus x oh they're wrong nope i wrote oppo n1 correct okay i thought like maybe it it makes more sense there was an oppo phone because didn't one plus was not yet a thing that's yeah okay and i'm sure we will get into that we will get into that later yeah so at the exact same time as this um she gets a call from this man named kirk mcmaster and there's this quote from stephanie that's like this thing happens in my life where like a lot of stuff just happens at the exact same time she had Carl calling her up asking to make a phone and she gets a call from this guy named Kurt now Kurt is an interesting character um you know Mariah is always making that joke that she's a 10x fintech founder and CEO yeah I just hope when anyone talks about me in the future they don't say

so this Andrewrew guy was an interesting character it just doesn't it does not sound like it's red flag stars nope yeah nope he's definitely a quirky fella um kurt dig had a few big hits for all of the companies that he was founding on a yearly basis uh he actually was the co-founder of Boost Mobile, which Ellis still uses for some reason. Let's go, baby! Where are my Boost customers at? I'll see you on the streets. It's a pay-as-you-go phone service

that was actually pretty successful for him. He did some work for Sony. He founded a water bottle company called Core Water. He led digital distribution for his edge that ringtone and wallpaper app from decades ago uh he did work for sega he founded a mobile game studio he founded a multi-platform transmedia consumer experience whatever the heck that means his list of companies is really long um serial founder very long serial founder anyway the story behind him contacting stephanie goes he had just bought a galaxy s3 which by the way freaking amazing phone the s3 was like not enough

for kurt apparently nice little oled screen oh it was so good it was so i pre-ordered that phone i was so excited about it but he bought a galaxy s3 and he thought or he thought it was the first android phone that could really come close to competing with the iPhone, right? Because it was so good. It had so many good specs, it seemed cool. But he got it, and he was really annoyed because it didn't have the latest Android version on

it. So the latest Android version at the time was Jelly Bean, but it had the one right before it. And specifically, Samsung used to take forever to push major android updates this is a big touchwiz fault also samsung had this ux called touchwiz yeah um for those that don't know what touchwiz is it was samsung's ux at the time for their smartphones and it was really bad you can tell how bad it was by the fact that it was named touchwiz yeah just think about

how bad it must be for people to call it touch touch wiz yeah just think about how bad it must be for people to call it touch wiz with a straight face that's not even me yeah now they re they literally rebranded it to one ui because touchwoods has so much bad blood yeah do you remember the default touch was wallpaper being like water or that was one of them i was thinking about the one that was like a cloudy sky oh yeah then they'd have the giant weather widget which was a different picture of a sky so there's two separate pictures of a sky overlayed htc did that first htc annoyingly pioneered the big weather i love that dude i loved that i love the big htc weather widget um anyway so he gets his phone he's like this doesn't have the most recent version of android this is dumb like why it seems like taking so long so he gets his phone. He's like, this doesn't have the most recent version of Android. This is dumb.

Why is Samsung taking so long? So he finds out about ROMing, and he downloads CyanogenMod for his Galaxy S3. And it already had Jelly Bean on it. It was more stock Android than TouchWiz was. It was just better in pretty much every perceivable way. And he's immediately obsessed with it. Being a 10X fintech founder and CEO, he calls Stephanie pretty much,

the story goes that he calls Stephanie that night, the night that he flashed it on his phone. He found her on LinkedIn, called her up and says, I'll get the money and be CEO, you be CTO. So he saw an opportunity. He was like, this is really good most android roms are really bad or most android ux's are really bad we can make we can make a religion out of this like a mini elon story yeah i was like twitter seems nice yeah how about i buy it

yeah okay so but ironically if you think about it this is not that different from the story of android right when they originally pitched android they were going around trying to sell this open OS to a bunch of handset manufacturers. Now they're like, Android kind of sucks and everyone's versions of Android suck. So what if we just made a good one and we give it to everybody to use as a basis? That was kind of their pitch. So Stephanie seemed pretty into the idea because she wanted to make her own device. Carl pay had just called about potentially making a new company that was based around her device, which is also cool. And he was like, I'm a hardware guy. Oppo

is a hardware company, we can make a new company that can be really, really good hardware and really good software. And Kurt had just showed up and it seemed like the perfect kind of mesh meshing of like, I'm an engineer, I don't want to deal with any of the business stuff but I do want to make my own phone everyone else can kind of like do that stuff for me very quickly after that CyanogenMod kind of gets turned into CyanogenInc and CyanogenMod still existed yeah right because there was a lot of weird, bad blood that was happening because the community was contributing to CyanogenMod, right? It wasn't just Stephanie that was updating it.

It was all these people that were adding to CyanogenMod. And suddenly they're like, wait, you're making a corporation out of the work that we put into this ROM. Yeah, you're the one making money potentially off of all the stuff that we've done at this point. Yeah, you're the one making money potentially off of all the stuff that we've done at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't great. But Kurt's big talent was raising money

and tons of money. And so he starts going around asking for venture funding, not dissimilar to Android. And the funny thing about this is they started getting funding from pretty much everyone that had a vested interest in making Google control Android less.

Right. Because they didn't want Google to have so much power over this thing that seemed to be one of the major like OSs in the ecosystem. Which is like one of the things that they developed that for because they didn't want Microsoft to have. Yeah. All of it. Exactly, dude. You know, history does this thing where like it happens again it just does the same thing over and over again yeah it just repeats

um so yeah microsoft invests qualcomm invests there's a bunch of these big companies that are is that ironic that's incredible yeah yeah so there's this kind of legion of like anti-google android companies that are like we want to take away google's sheer power on this open operating system which kind of makes sense if you're one of these other companies so stephanie made it clear that she was still going to be offering cyanogen mod for free to any like cyanogen mod right there was going to be a difference between cyanogen mod and cyanogen os cyanogen os was the thing that they would sell to a company that already had the hardware but just wanted to like have good software that they could just ship you would charge companies for

that and cyanogen mod was like if you're a regular person and you want to rom your phone and throw cyanogen on your phone you can do that for free and at this point has she left samsung to start doing this venture she basically left samsung to start doing this venture she basically left samsung to do this okay i was gonna say that's a lot of stuff to be doing on top of sorry samsung yeah so i'm sure samsung wouldn't be amped about that but yeah yeah so they go around and they're raising millions of dollars in funding and it was kind of convenient right because carl pay had already called and said like i kind of want to start a company based on this right but they wanted they wanted to maintain

control of Cyanogen. So he's like, I'm going to start this spinoff company of Oppo called OnePlus, right? So he wants to start OnePlus, but he doesn't want to do software. And Stephanie wanted to do hardware, but she only did software. So it was kind of this perfect merging. So they already they are getting funding, and they already have a couple of clients, they've got one plus they've got they're signing deals with this company called blue out of florida and they were interested in having cyanogenmon on there so the launch was like a pretty huge success um the one plus one came out with cyanogen os on it which was like a pretty it was a huge huge launch it was kind of the original like poco phone situation it was the og it was like the enthusiast phone because when that thing launched you only knew about it if you

were kind of following along you were like oh okay they're gonna make a phone this new one plus company they've never made anything before like and they're not in carriers like you have to know about this stuff to see that this phone is launching it hit pretty hard yeah it was this community oriented device um and it was 300 flagship build and specs and everything about it was pretty amazing oh sandstone i forgot about that that was that phone yep the original one plus one was 299 but they also had a higher tiered version of it with more uh storage the original version had 16 gigs of storage they also had one with 64 gigabytes of storage how much more did they charge for that much more storage is this the closest one um yeah sure nice without going over closest

without going over yeah what are you wagering? Two points. I'll wager 15 points. 15? Big baller. I have very little confidence in that 15 points, but... I just want everyone to know that Ellis is watching Marquez's 1 Plus 1 review right now. I shot that on Stephen's campus. One of the first videos i ever shot on red oh wow one of the first videos i ever shot outside there's honey nut cheerios in the background what a course outside not the a-roll the first time yeah in the a-roll but i shot the b-roll outside on campus oh and i just remember being outside on campus with a red camera just like this is weird

this is weird all right flip them and read marquez says 69 was the question how many more dollars it was or what the price was how many more dollars so the answer is $349. Oh my God. You have to. Come on. Give him the points. I gave him the points. I'm going to give Andrew that. All right. Not for points.

There you go. When do we think the most recent comment left on this nine-year-old video was? Dude, it could be yesterday. Three hours ago. It could be. Three hours ago? 12 hours ago. 12 hours ago?

15 hours ago. It was one hour ago 15 hours it was one hour ago and it says 2023 anyone nice okay anyway yeah so at the time just like insane specs insane price really good hardware really good build everything about it seemed amazing they don't make them like that anymore no they just they don't yeah i would say the Pixel 8 is the closest thing you can get. Yeah, maybe. But it's still not the fastest chipset. It's a little different. It doesn't have sandstone.

It doesn't have sandstone. It won't rip the inside of my pants. And scuff endlessly until the end of time. Yeah, and scuff endlessly. I still have the original sandstone one that I had. It looks awful. it looks so bad it really definitely got it got the worst end of dang dang wear and tear so things are going really well for oneplus right it was kind of this random company that was like a spinoff of oppa which

no one in the u.s or any other country had really heard of unless you're in china um and it seemed like maybe this could work it's just that like building a phone from like some different os had never really worked before in the united states the only other place that this had worked is xiaomi and trivia quit well i just gave the answer away xiaomi is china it's china all of my points i don't know if you guys know this, but Xiaomi, the brand, originally started as a custom ROM. Oh. It got really popular, and eventually they just thought, we should build our own hardware. So they started building their own hardware, and then that was really popular.

And so they just kept making devices, and then they just started branching out. And now they're one of the biggest companies in China. So Xiaomi and OnePlus kind of started this with the same similar ethos. Similar. However, OnePlus was sort of like an Oppo thing, sub-brand sort of. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So Oppo already had all like the hardware stuff, whereas Xiaomi was started by people

who worked at like Google and a few other big tech companies, but in China. And they were like making their own rom and then just decided they wanted to make their own hardware for the rom was it they made a ramen had a huge following or just like they had a huge following in china in china yeah yeah so pretty cool and they thought that maybe they could make uh one plus thought that maybe they could happen make that happen too with uh cyanogen mod it could be like this beautiful pairing where everything that grows from one plus and cyanogen mod are like together and they become this huge company, right? But this is where things start to get a little bit shaky. So investors were starting to pressure Kurt and Cyanogen Inc. to

actually generate any revenue at all. And they didn't really have a clear path to generating revenue there's kind of this thing that happens in silicon valley where you pitch your idea but you have no idea how you're going to make money and then uh vcs are just like acquire as many users as you can get as many users as you can like get get more people on your thing and we'll figure out the money later um and they don't ever figure out the monetization strategy i guess so when they joined with oneplus it was just like we were kind of helping each other out here so there wasn't there big money in there there was probably not a lot of big money because it was kind of like a launch partner thing for them was like one of the original things but their their main monetization strategy is we're going to charge companies to be the os

for this device so they were charging charging OnePlus, but OnePlus was also... Not enough for investors. Not enough for investors, right? They wanted to scale this as fast as possible. Classic. The investors didn't really know what the main selling point of Cyanogen OS was going to be. It was cool, and they were being very brazen,

trying to start this thing that Google owned, but it was sort of an anti-Google thing because you're sort of starting it in Google's, in Android's own ashes. And it's just weird. And they wanted to remove market dominance from Google while being a sub product of a Google product. It just seemed strange. Yeah. I mean, you got to be worried about that at any time where if your entire product is based off of something and then you breach into that something space a little too much yeah are you worried about losing i think the only reason that a lot of these investors felt okay um giving them money and not like not worrying that google was just going to like

shut them down at any minute was that google would probably get in some weird antitrust territory if they were like this is open source and then they meet and then they like shut down a thing that starts competing with them you know yeah so that's why they felt okay with doing it um yeah but they just wanted to acquire as many users which was a problem then bigger business problems uh started to emerge oneplus had planned to sell the oneplus one in a lot of countries uh including india and if you know OnePlus, one of their primary markets is India. But Kurt had sold exclusivity rights for Cyanogen OS

to this company called Micromax in India, which means that only Micromax phones with CyanogenMod could be sold in India. Whoops. Apparently he did not communicate that to Carl. And so it just got really dicey really quickly um really quick trivia question what was the brand of phones in india

that was under the micromax brand it was a sub-brand of micromax that ran cyanogen and this these are the most numerous devices that have run CyanogenOS. Think Soldier Boy. How much do you guys want to wager? How many points do I have? Marquez has 54. Andrew with one, two. Carry the one. Careful, Andrew. Careful, Adam. There was a Reddit post saying, anyone think that Adam's

joke about Andrew's score is getting a little tired? I disagree with them. And then somebody was just like, Andrew needs to pick it up, and the original poster's like, yeah, he does. So we're good. Listen, I only got one joke, all right? Look at that.

I think I'm entirely too confident about this one. Oh, my God. All in. Marques, do you plan to counter? One point. What? I don't know the answer. I just straight up don't know it. I can't lose points here one point oh what i don't know the answer i just straight up don't know it i can't i can't lose points right i don't know i don't know the answer

marquez says vivo i wrote alcatel say it with me on three one two three you i thought the soldier phone was a white label alcatel phone so that's why I wanted to tell it's a thing though it uh it is this is you ventures anyway this gets really dicey really fast it starts to be this like all-out public dispute that you can watch in real time happening on the internet between Carl Pei and uh Kurtaster. And it was kind of beautiful to play out. Um, Carl publishes this letter on the one plus forums. That's just like, I'm paraphrasing this cause it's a bit long, but he says this week we announced the one plus one will finally launch in India on October 7th.

Cyanogen released an update to comply with Indian regulations, which means that the phone would be able to, the one plus one was actually going to be able to work on Indian carrier markets, right? Therefore, it was surprising and disappointing to hear from Cyanogen on November 26th, which was a month and a half later, that they had granted exclusive rights in India over the Cyanogen system to another company. So they update the OnePlus One to be able to work in India, and then the next month they're like, you can't sell this in India. Woof. Woof.

Yeah. Big woof energy. And Carl Pei was just very like, what is going on? So they start this like back and forth where they're making all these public statements at each other about how the other company is trying to screw them. And they're each built on the back of each other's backs um the back of your back is also my back you know that kind of thing but carl does say he attributes a lot of one plus's success to cyanogen which is probably true yeah um because you know at the time it was like there are a lot of like tiny phone brands that could launch that have kind of no name like Like Carl was kind of a no name.

He was like an upper manager at Oppo, but that's kind of it. And the only reason that the OnePlus One became such a big hit was because it got all the press from having CyanogenMod on it. It's funny because like Carl Pei built a phone based on the hype of a community. Then the brands that he created had the hype of a community that he then built a new phone off of yes what carl pay is is the original hype man there are also a lot of open letters from the community that are just not too kind to kurt about this right because imagine you buy a one plus one to use in india and then they're just like oh you can't you you can't do this anymore.

You can't use this in India anymore. It's easy for them to pick sides. Yeah, it was a problem. At the last minute, because they could not use Cyanogen OS, they had to build another OS, which was called Oxygen OS. So OnePlus had to spin up this new OS because it couldn't use Cyanogen OS. It ended up being one of the most popular OSs in the Android-like world for a very long time. And it was actually not that different from Cyanogen OS.

It was very stock Android, very clean, very fast. And that was... Not anymore. Not anymore. Well, now it's ColorOS again. Yeah. Well, they made it ColorOS and then they renamed it back to Oxygen just because people thought they were different, even though they're exactly the same. Yeah, it's all naming conventions and stuff.

But things just got worse from there. Every time Cyanogen Inc. seemed to land some big deal, things just kind of stopped working. And there's even this crazy thing that Stephanie says that not a lot of people know about that ended up probably being the death blow for the company? You know, we were working on a project with a couple, with a large US carrier partner and a large manufacturer in China. And it was going to be the mod phone, right? We hired industrial designers. The manufacturer built like the first versions of it. It had this like, you know, really cool industrial designers. The manufacturer built the first versions of it. It had this really cool industrial design,

and we were bringing all these features to it. It was going to ship on a major carrier. We had all the stuff in place, and the worst thing happened. The manufacturer got hit with a trade embargo from the FTC. And that basically killed the whole project. Can you imagine what would have happened if a Cyanogen-branded phone got launched on a major U.S. carrier?

That would have been a very different path yeah for the for the history of android yeah wow very different right yeah you can kind of speculate on who that major oem might have been that got hit from this uh fine from the ftc we think we kind of deduced that was probably zte because at the time they got hit with this major, major fine. Something to do with giving a ton of money to Iran. Okay. Lots of US geopolitics going on in here. Nice. But it sucks, right?

It's like Cyanogen is just trying to make their phone. Yeah. So if you remember, ZTE had launched this phone called the ZTE Axon M that was an AT&T exclusive. Might have had that phone yeah it was the one of the first like dual screen phones oh that like it had a screen on each side and it would open up but it was just two separate screens it wasn't like it wasn't a foldable screen so like the surface sort of like the surface but it didn't it didn't close in on itself it's like the outsides were screens and it would open like this and it was just like flat on the back.

So it's a worse surface. An even worse surface. Anyway, AT&T at the time like was more open to launching more experimental devices like this. What, real quick, year-wise, what time period are we talking about now? Early 2016 through mid-2016. Yeah. So, yeah. They got hit with this trade embargo.

They couldn't do it. And Stephanie has this quote that was like, but that was ultimately like the downfall. That's what like broke my, like broke my soul. You know, after like we put so much effort into it, you know,

we had, you know, we had marketing, we had, you know, we, we had the device, like it was built,

right? Like, it exists. Which is rough because they'd been going out, trying to do their original thing of, like, selling the OS to everybody, and that wasn't working out. And Stephanie had been wanting to build her own hardware for so long. Finally, they're like, we have to make money somehow. Okay, let's build the phone.

They go, they build the phone. They have everything ready. It's ready to go. And then ZTE messes everything up allegedly ct allegedly just in case allegedly zt so things start getting really bad they're not making any money investors are getting upset um they have a big first round of layoffs in july then kirk mcmaster steps down as ceo how many sorry how many people do were working for them at that point i don't have an exact answer but at this point in time they had raised almost 100 million dollars in total and they had two offices one in seattle oh okay palo alto yeah and they were like it was a flush organization yeah okay yeah so so kirk mcmaxter steps down as ceo and he sends this email

announcing the first pivot of the company to a modular os like they were going to try to license off little bits of the os to people that needed it okay which seems strange i think he thought that like yeah like if someone wants the cyanogen, then we can sort of give them that. Selling it for parts. Selfies are great. Always great. That's the death rattle of a tech company. It's like, well, what about the parts for other things? Yeah.

So they try to make that work, but no. The next month, the Seattle office closes. Next month, Stephanie officially leaves after she gets removed from the board because she's having fights with Kurt. She's having fights with the rest of the board. It's not great. And later that month in December, the final build of Cyanogen OS is released. And then on December 24th, a blog post comes out called A Fork in the Road. This blog post was basically announcing the end and saying goodbye saying that cyanogen mod as well could not go on because the brand was too destroyed at that point and also because like other people now owned the cyanogen brand like they couldn't even do anything

with it which is so depressing um but the blog post said cyanogen mod has served the community well over its eight long years it's been our home bringing together their friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and giving it's apt then that on this eve of a holiday we pay our respects we take pride in our lineage and we move forward and continue to build on its legacy so cyanogen was dead and with with it, the ROMing community. Was the ROMing community dead? This beautiful combination of people who are all bastioning together

and making something beautiful. Was this the fall of the Android ROM? It's okay, I have the answer. Maybe. Maybe. And we'll find out after the break. Midnight snacks? Skip. can skip it oh what just like that just like that how about dinner with my third cousin skip it prince fluffy's favorite treats skippable midnight snacks skip my neighbor's nightly

saxophone practices uh nope you're on your own there could have skipped it should have skipped it skip to the good part and get groceries meals and more delivered right to your door on skip support for the show today comes from net suite anxious about where the economy is headed you're trees, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain.

So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle. Thank you. its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform slash waveform welcome back so remember that goodbye blog post called a fork in the road i read it with a tear in my eye yeah i remember reading it in my college dorm same no i was out of college though it was a little later no you're right but

i might have still been in that dorm it wasn't my college no i was in that apartment for like two more years he like broke back into it just to remember it wasn't the dorm sorry it was my college apartment my bad okay uh anyway the the blog post is called a fork in the road but do you guys trivia question know what it means to fork software how much are you willing to wager andrew this is one oh one okay if everything all in i feel i'm like i feel this is gonna be embarrassing if we get it wrong because we've been talking about it the entire episode yeah i don't know i don't want to put too many i i'll do like five i don't know i i have a general concept of what i think it means. With 53 points, you're going to bet five. Sorry, I'll bet three.

I have to write it? Andrew said... I just drew a branch off from... Correct. Okay. And I drew a branch. Correct. No, that's just a Y.

It's a fork. It's like a tuning fork. If I drew it in the middle, it would be too complicated for this analogy. Okay, yeah. It's a... So, yeah. A fork in the middle, it would be too complicated for this analogy. Okay, yeah. So, yeah. A fork in the road. You know that music video of See You Again?

No. You know what I'm talking about? By who? See You Again. I'm all about it when I see you again. Oh, that song. Remember the end of the music video? No. Paul Walker drives down one way.

Oh, yes. And Vin Diesel drives the other way wait are they really in the music video yeah and then just drive away that's hilarious that's cyanogen dang wow it's called a fork the blog post is called a fork in the road and in software it basically means that you have one line of software and you fork the software so they this one keeps being developed for this use and this one starts being developed in this direction and you could eventually end up with very different looking software

that started from the same original base. I disagree with Marquez's model. His went two different directions instead of straight. Well, that's why the one... Minus three, minus three. No, what I drew before, would you see what I drew before? Mine is branched off from,

which is like a branch on a tree, which is exactly correct. I wish I could rewind what I drew before. Mine is branched off from, which is like a branch on a tree. I wish I could rewind what I drew before. I had a circle, an empty circle, and then I had a circle with a dot in it to show that it was the same on one side. I don't want to derail anymore, so I'll let you keep your three points, but I think I was more right. I got it. Okay. I got it.

So anyway, yes, the blog post called A Fork in the Road was kind of a little hint, right? Sanjan might have been dead and they might have been saying goodbye, but reading the blog post again, you start to look a little deeper. It's like Da Vinci Code. Through a hyperlink, yes. It says, CyanogenMod has served the community well over its eight years. It's been our home bringing together friends from all over the world

to celebrate our joy of building and giving. It's apt, then, that on this eve of a holiday we pay our respects. We take pride in our hyperlinked lineage as we move forward and continue to build on this legacy. And what happens when you click the lineage hyperlink? Boom. A fork appears. Lineage OS. I thought you meant like a real like an actual an image of a fork appears yes so the first blog post was december 24th 2016 it's a christmas eu

and uh it was that was our that was our blog post saying this is us like it's the same people this is some of the core team behind lineage os. You'll probably learn more about them in a sec. But effectively, what happened is a number of people who had been working on CyanogenMod and CyanogenInc were like, we're not going to just let this die, right? CyanogenMod was an open sourced thing. It's very different from when like a company goes under and all the ip that they had just gets destroyed cyanogen the name cyanogen mod the name cyanogen os the name was owned by venture capital but the actual code wasn't so all of the code even developed inside of the like offices under the official corporation well still was open the stuff that wasn't open source so they were developing stuff that were

closed source for cyanogen os okay and then they were developing open source. So they were developing stuff that were closed source for Cyanogen OS. Okay. And then they were developing open source stuff for Cyanogen Mod. Okay. Yeah. And so, yeah, they just took Cyanogen Mod and they basically forked it, changed the name in all the code from Cyanogen to Lineage OS. Right? This is the launch of Lineage OS.

So they put out this blog post. It says, you've probably read the news articles today. If you haven't, please see the following. Yes, this is us. Lineage OS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. To quote Andy Rubin, this is the definition of open. A company pulling their support out of

an open source project does not mean it has to die. And I find that very beautiful. Yeah. So capitalism and venture capital might have destroyed Cyanogen, the company, but Cyanogen lives on. This actually reminds me of a lot of what happened with Boosted Boards. If you guys haven't heard the Boost boosted boards episode it's audio only but basically the same thing they got a bunch of venture capital didn't couldn't make enough

money and then they fell apart and then they got sold for parts a word to the wise and a million other companies have fallen victim yes yes yes yes yes but of course that was not open sourced right if it's like if it was an open sourced skateboard, then somebody else could take the build, the open source build of the electric skateboard and make a new company based on it. But all that IP just got sold to Lime and all that stuff. The Sign Engine project just needed to be born into something else. So the code base was all public domain, but the brand could just be restarted by anybody. I seem to remember this being a time when I started to kind of forget about ROMing, though.

You know, this was the end of 2016, December 2016. And if you guys remember, the Nexus phones used to be these, like, awesome, incredible developer-focused devices that Google also sold to regular people. You know, it was was like they had a different manufacturer make all these devices i can't name every single one right now just in case you're thinking about that being a trivia question no okay um but wait i'm curious name them all

oh you like nexus phones name every single one nexus one then we got Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Then we got LG Nexus 4. So good. Then we got, let's see, Nexus 5. LG Nexus 5. He's wrong. He loses all his points. Motorola Nexus 6. Motorola, Shamu Nexus 6.

Huawei Nexus 6P. Nexus 6P, but also Nexus 7 tablet came out as well. Yes. That was also LG. That was way earlier, though. Oh, sorry. I'm just going in number order. Well, Nexus 7 was called 7 because of the size not of the number yeah and that was made by nexus 7 lg

lg no nexus 7 yeah asus oh right i had one yeah and then the nexus 10 was samsung yeah they skipped so many numbers well those those correlated with the size of the screen. That was a 7-inch tablet and a 10-inch tablet. Yeah, so where's the Nexus 3? Yeah, there was no Nexus. That's what I'm saying. That's true. That's true.

That's true. Yeah. The 6P and the 5X came out the same time, with Huawei being the manufacturer of the 6P and the 5X was LG. Yeah, at the same time. Anyway. I prefer the 6P.

The 6P was the 5x was lg yeah at the same time anyway i prefer the 6p the 6p was the last nexus phone but um cyanogen died in december of 2016 what was launched in october of 2016 marquez you have 56 andrew you have two what would you like to wager anything that was launched um notice that we just talked a lot about nexus devices 29 points we just talked a lot about nexus devices and i remember i was saying that was kind of around the time that i started forgetting about romming and i wasn't as interested in like flashing roms on my phone constantly and it was still true that like a lot of features kept getting brought from

those ROMs into new versions of Android. Yeah, yeah. Why was I forgetting about ROMing? They had Nexus devices and what happened in October of 2016? First one, they locked the boot letter. Andrew, how many points

are you willing to win? None. Not even going to guess. Is this the first one they locked the bootloader? No. Oh, okay. Well, I wrote Pixel 1. That's true.

Correct. Yeah, Pixel 1. Did it take until like Pixel 3 to lock the bootloader? I actually don't know. They might have locked it in Pixel 1. Oh, all right. Yeah, but it was kind of like this interesting timing where sanjin the company goes under sanjin mod has to change everyone's kind of losing interest

in roaming because and then the pixel comes out right this was kind of like the pixel was a little bit less open than all of the other nexus that were made for developers. Like, it was still easy to ROM. Google was still committing to Android getting really good. But they were committing more to Android getting really good than before. They wanted to make the Android iPhone, right? They realized we can actually do this. We want to make a device that can become the bastion of what Android could possibly become. do this. We want to make a device that can become the bastion of what Android could possibly become.

And so it had been a while since Android wasn't very good. And over those eight years since the first Android phone, Google had really built it out. But I think Android was also just more of kind of an open book at that point. You know, stuff was changing a lot. There were more

devices that you could actually flash ROMs on now that you know there were now more manufacturers have them locked down um and android just became a more mature operating system over time right uh and it just back when it was less mature it was a lot more fun and interesting to rom to kind of mess around with flashing roms because there was kind of more stuff to do there were a lot of features that you could add. Different manufacturers' operating systems were not very good. It was just like it was in your best interest to be ROMing.

So this kind of left me wondering, like, okay, so if Android was good now, like, what's the point in something like LineageOS? Like, are there any people still, were there any people still ROMing? Like, it seemed like it's cool that you picked up the the pieces of cyanogen mod yeah but there's got to be way less people actually using it right it's got to be way less um but what i was told by the lineage people actually really surprised me um you would assume that the community had kind of died and they were barely holding on. But how many devices are currently running LineageOS? A, 500,000.

B, 1.5 million. C, 3 million. And D, 5 million. All in. All in. Marques? Do it. I'm going to. Nine points. All in. Marquez? Do it. I'm going to.

Nine points. Oh my goodness. I'm betting nine points and Andrew's betting two. One, carry the one. Do you have any points, Andrew? You have one? He's got two. Two?

Okay. Flip him and read. They both put D? No. 1.5 million is the answer. But you're optimistic. But 1.5 million is still a lot. And I think that there was a lot of people talking about ROMing back in the day because phones were so bad, because they didn't have as many features.

They needed to run faster, needed to add things to it. And people were just more willing to be experimental with their devices because they were so bad. Whereas now it's like most of the stuff the phones do very well, you know. You have to go through like quite a lot of effort to ROM your phone.

And are you going to get that much out of it? What are you going to get out of it? Yeah, it's not going to double the speed. It's not going to make the camera significantly better. And there's like a lot of things you can do do as well you can side load things like you don't really need to flash a whole rom yeah it feels like modifying a car when stock cars are so good and you're like you're you're decreasing your reliability yeah at the cost at the like benefit of not that much extra yeah yeah So the people that are flashing ROMs has probably gone down quite a bit.

SanogenMod, as they say, had a much younger, more excited user base that was like flashing those nightlies and just talking about it a lot. Whereas now, if you think about it, kind of everything is a computer, right? Like those terminals at like McDonald's that order your food run on Android. What is a the quest 3 runs on android yeah the switch parts of the

switch run on android all-star 2 yeah the all-star 2 has android automotive yeah all of this different stuff like all of these things run on and aosp which is android open source project so like you know if you could just take something that was a better version of Android, say Lineage OS, that had been significantly updated and had newer Android features and it's open, open source,

you could put it on your device. Wouldn't you do that instead of using AOSP? I kind of want to know how many of the 1.5 million Lineage OS devices are not smartphones? Are there refrigerators running Lineage OS in people's basements? Probably. That's awesome.

I don't think any companies have really come out and said we are using Lineage OS as our basal stuff. Most of them, you don't need the latest Google camera app. Like, Michelle told us that his printer runs Android. It's running like yeah like yeah it's running like android 8 but you don't need like a camera and all this like latest stuff yeah um so yeah well there are there are still a lot of community members that are maintaining lineage for individual devices like if you go on the lineage website most popular phones on there are on there and it sort of works the same way as it worked on cyanogen mod where you buy a new phone

you decide you want it to be the guy that maintains it you go on and you maintain it and it's kind of fun but it's being used a lot in like in industry now okay it's very different so i'm trying to figure out okay well what really happened to the the modding community right like people stopped using this is it it just because Android got mature and things got good? Right? Now, you might have heard of this kind of conspiracy theory that's been going around for a while that Google has been taking things from AOSP. And instead of updating AOSP, they just update them in the Google Apps, right? And this is sort of a major thing that has been happening for quite a few years now.

So yes, Android is open sourced. And if you want to use Android, you can use it. But it's like the camera app's gonna be from like Android 8 and this app's gonna be from Android 8. I made a video about this. Yeah, yeah. And they started just like using their own stuff and like they have have Pixel X now.

And the Messenger client in AOSP is different from Google Messages. And everything is Google this, Google that versus the AOSP versions. So there's kind of this conspiracy theory that Google intentionally, they need to make money off of Android. They originally made it open source because they needed to get as much of a user base as possible. But then at one point they were like, how do we monetize this? We can't keep giving away all the good stuff that we're making for free. It's like the fourth time this has been brought up. Like somebody's like, we got to be, I got to make some money off this.

I really want to. I really want to do it. Yeah. So I asked a lot of people, right? I asked Michelle, I as the lineage guys like i was kind of like trying to ask them like do you think this is the main reason that rami has like gotten so not popular you know that google is like taking aosp and making it a lot harder to like build stuff off of and they actually think that it makes a lot of sense for google to be

doing this uh because the biggest reason that they say is that our phones are now a much more major part of the way that we live our lives, right? And back in the day, you could ROM your phone, you could do whatever you wanted. And like, you would still go to your bank, maybe, and there would be a banking app. But the banking app was really bad. It was very new. And as our phones kind of get more mature and have become a more integral parts of our lives there have been people at those banking companies are like whoa whoa whoa whoa this person is throwing an os that we have no idea what it is and the security features we have no idea what it is and they're using our banking app on some phone and so a big

reason that both the lineage os people and people like Michelle think that roaming is like getting a lot harder and people are not doing it as much is because now Google has made it that if you use a custom ROM on your phone, things like banking apps don't work. Right. And imagine your banking app doesn't work. Like that's a major reason not to ROM your phone. You can't use a lot of the core features that you would want to use on your device yeah it's not worth it yeah it's not worth it anymore because like what are you gonna do you're gonna get like you're gonna like unlock your snapdragon processor and get faster performance like what does that even mean i don't

have my flashlight but like early on when we're talking about like roaming phones and doing it all the time and resetting it and like just so little of your life was on it back then like it was a device that was accessory your phone is everything about you at this point there are so many insanely important things and if something were to mess up on your phone you could be really screwed for a while so like it's way scarier to also just like do things to your totally yeah yeah so security is like very important yeah you know there's security patches and bug fixes all the time just all the time as like it's like it's a rat race as soon as there gets there's this bug that people find out about they got to patch

it and then people exploit it and patch and exploit it. And it's the whole thing. Yeah. Um, random trivia question. There is a fast food app that does not work. If you mod your phone, which one, which one, all of my fast food app.

Oh God. Doesn't work. You're wagering all of your zero points. I don't know why I feel like I have zero points. I thought you had two. And then he wagered them all last time we'll give you a credit of 100 points whoa 50 points 50 point i get 50 because marquez won't wager more than 10 what's marquez at 76 i've gotten a bunch wrong okay i wager 50 points there The only thing Andrew's this confident about is Taco Bell, but I don't want to say Taco Bell.

That's a little bit concerning. That's the nicest thing you've ever said about me. Remember that there's a prize. Don't you want to win the prize? Oh, fair. Wow, he got a crit. Well, that's interesting. Well, I'm going to write a fast food app,

and I don't think I'm right. But what are you wagering? Oh. You said I wagering? Oh. You said I had what? 76. Six. Six. Six points.

Wow. Imagine only wagering six points. Andrew could potentially end up owing me 50 points. What? What does that mean? What's the question again? Just so I know. There is a fast food app that does not

work if you mod your phone if you unlock your bootloader what is that fast food app that's a good one i don't know all right oh i saw you right i wrote wendy's no oh i wrote starbucks no the answer is mcdonald's yeah michelle says he doesn't really know why this is the case i don't know i'm so sad that i got that wrong yeah i have a guess i mean it probably has to do with the money thing right yeah it has to do with gpay like i with gpay is that what they call it now? is that what the kids are calling it these days? google pay google wallet

google pay gwallet no wallet pay? gchat google pay google hollow yeah it probably does like a check

and if there's anything wrong with the OS it's just funny that it's it's only mcdonald's that does it that was the one that michelle pointed out in particular yeah it could be other ones too it looks like starbucks does a lot of the same stuff well starbucks is a bank that's what i was gonna say when you wrote that and how many starbucks gift cards yeah that made a lot that's how starbucks makes all their money is by investing your money that you

add to your card on the app it's yes they're literally a bank yeah That's why it's called Starbucks. Hey! Sorry. Anyway. Minus 70 points. That felt horrible to say out loud. Yeah. So yeah, security is just becoming really important because our devices are kind of like this one-stop shop. They really are PDAs now.

And so as security gets more important, all of these apps are like, I don't want this unknown OS to be running my app, especially when it has things like your financial details on it. Because if they get in trouble, they're going to get in a lot of trouble. It's risky. Yeah.

So it's getting more closed down. And surprisingly, people like the LineageOS team and Mishal are like, yeah, that makes sense. We actually totally understand that. Right? So it's not as much of the like Google is intentionally trying to make Android harder to use. They really think that

the reason is because of security. I'm sure they're also like they don't want to be the one to create something and then that winds up being the reason somebody loses a lot and then they have to think like that's kind of our fault. And like not even legally, but just like that sucks to think like we did something that a bunch of people lost important things

yeah yeah but it is a bummer because like even rcs does not work in aosp oh yeah yeah that like the messaging client of aosp doesn't have rcs support that's funny you have to use google messages which is crazy but you know the spirit of roaming is not dead um there's plenty of open source material that's being published consistently um people like stephanie are a huge open source like people they like really advocate for it and i think that even if these roms like lineage os are not the level of cyanogen mod like they used to be where the community was like there were so many people and everyone was super excited about all the time and flashing every single day

i think every community will always have enough people that want to maintain it and just for the reason that they want to maintain it right they're not good they don't have to make a company out of everything and that's kind of the magic wise words of open source you don't have to make a company out of this gotta make money gotta make money out of this i just remember yeah the modding days were fun they were i had my and i still have it the original motorola droid that i had that phone i can't believe it's still boots that phone went through it and that my galaxy nexus i had custom roms i was overclocking those phones. I had custom kernels where you could choose like,

all right, let me get up to 1100 megahertz when the screen is on, but then underclock down to 200 megahertz when the screen is off and have this refresh rate so that I can like cycle between those clock speeds quickly and end up with a faster phone with longer battery life with all these custom kernels. It was insane.

These phones were cooking in my pocket. Just trying was it's unreal and i was flashing nightlies i was i was yeah all that i was that was that was quite a time yeah yeah when was the last time you tried to rom a phone i i think right around the time that cyanogen was done yeah like i remember being on the nightlies i remember doing a lot of paranoid android and like because that was like an ult rom yeah right around when Cyanogen was super... Yeah, it was like Cyanogen was the big one. But there was Paranoid Android on the

side, which is like, oh, it's got these cool themes and a couple extra kernel features for my overclocking desires. I definitely wasn't doing it much after 2015, 2016. I did it once on my Eris. That's all I remember. shout out to the eris i just think it's like pretty incredible how important cyanogen mod ended up being to like a

lot of stuff that happened you know like one plus only really exists the way it does because of cyanogen mod yeah i mean it was a community-based thing that was also built off a different person that built something and then made it to like it's literally in the history of android at this point and like android phones in general so yeah that's wild yeah so while we might not do a lot of roaming ourselves anymore i think it's beautiful that communities will still come together and make open source projects that are really cool you want to do one more trivia to can i get 50 more points sure i wager everything all right can i get how many points do you have? No, I'll take 50 points.

That works. I think that's okay. Marques has 70 points. All right. What famous piece of science fiction media does the name Nexus of the Google phones come from? We've definitely talked about this before. I have no idea. The second you said famous media, I i was cooked i'll give you a hint this famous piece of sci-fi media has androids in it star something let's go with

androids these androids may or may not be asleep sometimes and while they are asleep they might be doing something all right what'd you guys get i wrote the bachelor is this is it i'm gonna feel horrible did you put starbucks again i'll give you a hint the book and the movie have different names and i'll accept either android's dream of electric sheep and um well or do android's dream of electric sheep is this wrong Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Is this wrong? He put Star Wars. That is unfortunately wrong.

David is right. And the movie is Blade Runner. Yes. Famous media. In fact... Wait, he wagered all his points. Marques wagered all his points and he had 70 points. So now he has zero.

No. Andrew had negative 50 and wagered 50 i did not wait negative 100 um no carry the one android from uh blade runner the model is the nexus 6 what oh wow and uh and the estate of philip k dick sued google over it that's really funny yeah dang the prize for the winner is a lovely 3d printed crown that tim is handing to look at this you may hand it to marquez because he won with zero points over my headphones tim is placing the crown on marquez beautiful nice little tiara all right it sucks a little spin, I think, on this crown. I think the winner of every trivia moving forward gets this crown.

I like that. So it just gets passed around. I like that. This crown? Yeah. Yeah. I'll write my name on it, and then every subsequent winner should also do the same. There we go.

Okay. But it was fun kind of like recapping on what happened from the birth of Android up until now and how important the open source community was to all of that i mean as someone who wasn't part of that community and did very little knew just enough about it to know what cyanogen mod was and then to know about it as in like inside of one plus and stuff yeah it's fun it was a crazy set of years dude sounds like something i would have been into and i was flashing cyanogen mod nightlies every single day wiping my device every single day i would lose

all of my data all of my photos every single day for no reason because i was a nerd same that's you and me both yeah simpler times simpler times but it was a good era of Android yeah zero points thought about it um and we'll catch you guys

in the next one remember there's a regularly scheduled episode for Friday so don't worry about that see you later peace Wayformer is produced

by Adam Olena Ellis Robin we are partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is by Bane so by Adam Olena and Ellis Robin. We are partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is by Bane and Syl.