[Motorola Droid X2] dragonzkiller:
Wow. I can't believe it's been this long that I've had this phone. The DroidX2, MB870, or whatever you want to call it has been a huge part of my life for the past two years. As strange as that may sound, you all know that it is true. I was sitting at my desk today, staring at it plugged into my computer when nostalgia'd hard core to the first day I got this phone and did the same thing. I thought back to all the things I went through for this phone (and for you guys) and how much I've learned. It's been through hell and probably worse but all in good fun.

I know that I had never really been a "consistent" developer by any means. Dropping in and out of chats, disappearing for months on end, but one thing that never left my side was this phone. When I got it back then I knew that I wanted to hack it, play with it, develop for it, change it, mold it, whatever. And I think I did just that. Not as much as a wanted to, not as much as I think I could have done, but boy did I have fun doing it. I remember building CyanogenMod 7.0-RC1 on a really old Toshiba with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM just trying to figure out how to even begin to make a ROM for this phone. It was painful. I remember my first SBF attempt failed because I didn't have my battery charged (now I have two phones and 3 batteries).

The first real thing I did was trying to tear apart the SBFs from a few similar phones and looking through the CDT tables for any answer to unlocking the phone. We never did find that answer (well... maybe, but that's a different story) but I wasn't going to be discouraged. The first real development effort I put into the X2 was with navendrob porting over the pull down settings from the new (still Gingerbread) Atrix ROMs. I tore through smali code, XML files, copying and pasting chunks of code from all over. And then, it happened. I got the pull downs to show up and work. I was incredibly excited (and I showed it all over the IRC) of what I had accomplished. Although this wasn't the first real effort on the X2 as keep in mind that many of us were using Eclipse at the time, I was incredibly happy that it was the first real development for the X2.

SIDE NOTE: I'm incredibly proud of nitroglycerin33. He took his experience from themeing (theming?) the X2 and brought it out to be a widely used ROM on MANY different devices. So props to him for achieving more than I have.

I went on to try to work on getting real ROMs working on the X2. This was around the time we started getting 2nd-init working (the magic behind most of the Motorola ROMs at the time). I remember the first time I got it working. All I did was set one property (something like does.this.work=1) and seeing it show up. But besides randomly popping up in the forums, I started working on ClockworkMod Recovery (which I barely got working, but never fully functional). At this time I created my Twitter account and posted this picture. The date was November 16, 2011 (wow). But I knew that I had to get 2nd-init working better before I could fully get CWMR fully working and updated everyone with why it was so hard to get working.

So I set out to get CyanogenMod actually working from a complete build from scratch (not some hacked Atrix thing) and I posted my progress in the development forum. With the help of my guinea pig Moonshadow-NM doing my actual ROM tests, I watched as we slowly got to the boot animation, and to the home screen. You cannot believe how excited I was. There were so many flaws, that it was barely usable, but I was so happy (I think I scared my roommate from all the excitement). I slowly worked out the kinks, and it's still perhaps the most stable ROM that the X2 has (although I love Jellybean and won't go back to CM7 despite the issues I have).

And the rest is history. I remember holding "release events" for my ROMs. Teasing everyone with new updates, features, fixes, you name it. The IRC chat room would be packed with people waiting for me to post the link. And I was excited to see where we would go. And even if we didn't go very far, we still went on (mostly) as a team. Through ICS, and now JB, I tried to provide what Motorola refused to give.

So this is my thank you to all of you. Past, and (very few) present. You all have helped me through my craziness and issues with this phone and I can never thank you guys enough for it all. I never thought I would have "internet friends" but you guys sure as hell came close. This isn't the end of my adventures with Android. I will be getting a new phone (hopefully) in the coming weeks/months and I want to be a vital part of that development community also. I'm keeping my Java/C/C++ skill sharp still by writing a JNI app. I'm not going to release it as it's mainly just for experimental purposes, but it allows me to practice those languages while focusing on SQL database integration, cryptography, and JNI integration in Android.

So from one X2 guy to another: thank you for all you've done, all you do, and all you will do.

Peace,

dragonzkiller