[Spirit FM] mikereidis:
Notice: I am DESPERATELY searching for ways I can reduce my working hours to 40 per week, so I can get started on the personal tasks I've neglected the past few years.

My primary idea is to focus my support efforts on higher end Samsung and HTC phones. Thoughts are welcome.

As it is now, it feels as if I spend 40 hours per week just dealing with email and trying to help mostly paid customers. And of course paid customers deserve all the support I can provide. I'm VERY happy that my Google Play income is now sufficient to continue working indefinitely on Spirit.

But this leaves me with no time to do essential things, like backing up my source code more often, maintaining my development equipment properly and even just keeping my work area reasonably clean.

So there ends up being no time to do further development. And as time goes on, more and more ROMs are created on which Spirit has problems.

There has been very little progress made so far on CM9/10 to support FM, unlike on many CM7 ROMs for which the "CM7" audio method was a blessing to me.

So I've been forced into a ridiculously time consuming search for "hacks" on various phones. For many phones, there is no current solution. For others, some hacks are bad enough that only a full phone reboot will allow normal audio and phone calls.

I've been trying to get some help from various CM and other devs, but it's a time consuming process and I too often get no reply or help at all. And as CM builds continue to move towards open source audio libraries, the audio methods that worked before no longer work. I dread the day that this happens to the very popular Galaxy S2, as it did to GS3.

I no longer read any Google Play reviews, as I simply don't have the time. My progress on a FAQ is extremely slow.

The last thing I want is to become like some other devs who don't respond on their threads or don't reply to email.

So I don't know exactly what I'm going to do to stop getting bogged down in an impossible amount of work. Ideas are welcome, and your understanding is appreciated. :)

I may declare the rest of 2012 to be a "down time" of much lower development speed on Spirit. No new features are expected and I will likely concentrate on the larger problems on the higher end Samsung and HTC phones.

It's hard for me to say "no", especially to current paid customers. In some cases I think I'll just have to say: "Spirit worked for you on older ROMs, but I can't help you on many of the latest ROMs. And if a new version of Spirit stopped working for you, I'll be happy to provide an older working version."

I'd like to think that if your 2-3 year old phone can't be supported, that you will eventually upgrade. And that you will be happier I spent time making newer phones work instead of spending time on relatively "ancient" phones.

Samsung is clearly the current leader in Android smartphones. IMO, HTC is second. Both are relatively developer and custom ROM friendly companies.

OTOH, IMO #3 Motorola is unfriendly. Most of their boot-loaders are locked and they produce IMO WAY too many phones with FM not working, either through hardware or software deficiencies. And #4 LG has a relatively awful record in various things.

Some other OEMs may have a decent market-share. But most of my customers are using (or considering) Samsung and HTC phones.

Samsung and HTC phones are the majority of my test phones (5+7= 12 out of 15), are the ones I would buy for personal use, and are generally the only phones I would recommend. And very simple logic indicates I should concentrate on the higher end and most popular devices.