[Exodus ROM Discussion] Martin_Ro:
Hello Guys,

welcome to the world of Team-Exodus.

What is Team-Exodus ?

We are a small group of entusiasts that like to learn more about Android and the Android-ROM developement.

We aren't exactly beginners ;) But there is still room to learn more (you never end learning).

What is Exodus-Rom ?

Maybe, we better should start, what Exodus-Rom isn't: It isn't a (semi)professional mainstream ROM like CyanogenMod,AOKP or similar Roms. We don't focus on buzzword features, nor are we into "bling bling" options. We don't need a "change clock color" option, just because we can do it. These are "low hanging fruits", something nearly everybody can do, who has a computer to compile Android.

So what is Exodus-Rom, what is our focus on ?

We mainly focus on learning how things can be done. We are more into "quality over quantity". We prefer to have 4 or 5 real good and stable working features and not 20-30 features that work... somehow... sometimes...

We want performance, a fast, smooth fluid UI, a real good user experience, not a overbloated kang rom.

For instant that's the main reason why we currently don't have a Marshmallow Rom online, but I will give you a little more information regarding Exodus-6.0 (marshmallow) later.

But before that, who are we, who is "Team-Exodus" ?

The core team of "Team-Exodus" consists of the following guys:

[MENTION=2482196]PrimeDirective[/MENTION] - Dave, a very talented developer from the US, founder and Team Leader of Team-Exodus, specialist in App developement (for instant our Exodus Updater or the Drop Wallpaper App) and also our specialist for in deep functionalities of the Android Rom (like a complete rewritten Navbar customization). He currently uses bacon (Oneplus One) and Flounder (Nexus 9) for developenemt
[MENTION=6320596]Raja.M[/MENTION] - Raja, a real nice guy from India, he is our java specialist, he started Android developement something link 6 month ago but his knowledge is fast growing. He developes on the bacon (Oneplus One)
[MENTION=5986135]TheCrazyLex[/MENTION] - Alex, a kernel specialist from germany, he joined Team-Exodus like 3 month ago, mainly responsible to optimize and unify our kernels where possible. He also uses the Bacon (Oneplus One) as developement device.
[MENTION=4193479]usmcamgrimm[/MENTION] - Adrian, our graphics and theme specialist. Beside his amazing wallpapers, he is also responsible for all our LGE G3 devices. He mainly developes on the VS985.
[MENTION=4429892]Martin_Ro[/MENTION] - myself, Martin, also from germany, mostly responsible for the server with the build system, gerrit and download page. I'm also developing here and there if I find some time as I'm a married guy with to young boys. I'm developing on shamu (Nexus 6).

But beside this core team, there are a lot more ppl that help us making the Exodus Rom as amazing as possible, I will add some more of them step by step :)

So, now, back to Marshmallow and why it takes so much more time to bring an Exodus-6.0 to you guys:

For this to understand, you need to know more about where we come from.

On late 2014 we (Dave and Me) parted from VanirAOSP (that wasn't really AOSP but also used CM as base at that time btw) because we feeled like it started to get more and more into that mainstream "feature count is everything".

With 5.1 we started to directly use CyanogenMod (cm-12.1) as base, but was somewhat annoyed by upcomming issues because they used their open source branch as testfield for unfinished stuff, so for 6.0 we decided to go as near as possible back to strict AOSP.

But a matter of fact is: With strict AOSP you aren't able to support every device, and not as many devices as we want to support. So we have had to make some decisions and try some stuff. In the end we started developing Exodus-6.0 with a Mixture of strict AOSP and CAF as base, with the really amazing wide support of CyanogenMod regarding devices.

But with this, we got back to one of our main concerns: CyanogenMod is doing a fantastic job regarding device support (nobody can beat them in that department) but they are cluttering their stuff more and more. In the past few month, they started to create their own SDK, their own framework. And their SDK started to grow like a octupus, sticking his arms into every aspect of android. But we don't want to use their sdk, so we needed to remove it from everywhere.

And that was, what took so long. We wanted the device-tree and their hardware layer, but not their feature, and for sure not their SDK. And removing that stuff from everywhere inside the device-trees and Hardware layer.

Also we needed to use some of their code stuff in various places to make the connection between our AOSP/CAF based ROM and their hardware/device stuff.

So that took us nearly a month to finish up, but now we have first working experimental builds for bacon, shamu and VS985 so we can go into the real developing stuff.

There is still a lot to do (bring back all the features we want to, make the rom that fluid that you might be used to from EXODUS-5.1 etc.) But the real hard part is done now and we are way neared to a first public beta. Depending on the time Dave can find for Exodus (he is really really busy currently because of a new job), we expect to have a public beta by the end of the month...

So stay tuned and be patient :)