[Miscellaneous Android Development] zerorax:
Well, I had this idea 2 days ago, and I've given it a lot of thought. I want to rip apart AOSP and rebuild it using python and elf binaries instead of making everything in Java and making a decision file so it seems faster and more responsive... I want to rip out the Dalvik JVM, rip out everything pretty much, port the latest python, as well as the 2.7.x legacy python interpreters to Android and build an interface for loading python compiled or uncompiled(well JIT compile it whenever the md5 hash changes of the installed package, and also add support for pure elf binaries as packaged apps for the heavy lifting and performance, and rebuild from as little code from AOSP as possible a whole phone system, with lighter apps and any apps really done in python, and give the option for the binaries for high performance and multithreaded apps. We'll be using FOSS products modified to suit our needs, and building everything phone related that we can't use with an open license in python. So essentially rewriting every system and user app, from scratch in python, and of course we can optimize with C libraries and for that extra performance boost I'll edit the libs if I feel it's worth it with asm optimization. Call me a masochist but I love finding uses for my asm skills. I'm a noob to Android specific development but have a good working of using Linux(I've been using it 20 years although I've only gotten good with it in the past few years. I've been coding for 25 years, 13+ of those were spent learning assembly and os development. I've written functional minimalist kernels for hobby projects in pure asm, both x86 and arm, although I'll admit I'm less practiced on the arm instruction sets. So, python and native binaries as apps instead of Dalvik Java, and an entire interface in these 2 options from the system UI to the dialer to the calculator... Etc... Most of the basic app set will be python based in my vision of how this will work, and the developers can use c or c++ or anything I port a compiler for or write one for, and a set of python libraries that are C based and also matching libs for the libc component, probably based mostly on the same code for both C and Python. I feel like supporting python will result in more app developers wanting to write for our marketplace because most coders I know agree with me that writing code in python is better for rapid deployment as well as being less of a pain to implement. So app market fills up faster, more app developers, high performance native elf binaries, and a completely new design offering competing features against Android and iOS. We will have to rewrite everything from the system UI to the typical basic user apps. I'm guessing I will take me between 6 and 8 months to get the OS to a point where it's ready for app developer to start working on the core apps, then when that's done we can release a beta that also serves as a developer preview build for people to populate a marketplace before the OS goes into a public beta phase, by which point the developer preview users should have some non-essential apps to add appeal to the OS. I don't want this to end like Symbian where you have a superior OS and no apps and no device support beyond a few crummy phones from one maker. I'm looking for input on what people think of this idea. We will still be bound by AOSP licenses unless I go crazy and go overkill replacing everything from top to bottom. I can write Android drivers, I can port the toolchains and interprter, and I can make some of the apps, but once the core of the OS is finished and the HAL is available to all our supported languages, I'm going to need app developers to help me because writing a huge complete and quality OS release by myself would take many years. If you have any comments or criticism or advice or anything to say about this new project please post it or message me. Right now I'm collecting e-mailed addresses or other contact info for people interested in app development. I have 6 people so far who want to help but a 7 man team can't build Rome in a day so I'm going to need support from others to make this happen in a reasonable time frame with a completive selection of useful apps.

I'd like to create a superior alternative to Android and do it in a way that will encourage it to be adopted by people and hopefully even device manufactures will pick it up once the project matures and be shipping phones with it as the stock ROM/OS. For now I'm in the research/hacking phase, as I only started about 36 hours ago and have only been working with Android as developers for a couple months, but I feel confident I can do this if the right people help out, and I feel like Android has gotten too bloated and people are just using it because it's better than iOS, but in reality iOS provides competing performance on far less powerful system specs, which I think we can achieve if this is done right. Which would put a normal 4-8 core Android phones performance off the charts in comparison. I have Nexus 5, a Galaxy S5 Neo, a Galaxy Grand Prime, and I'm going to order some more phones when I get paid so I have more devices to mess with and do kernels/driver developers for. I think at first though we start with a stripped down AOSP that boots and gives debugging and and other logs, both on screen and via ADB logcat, so that we have a debloated core system to build on top of, which is what I worked on for the past 36 hours straight. Now it's time for rest but I thought before I get the sleep I missed while working on this I would make a post here and see what other people think of the idea. If we package source and the core OS has the toolchains to build for the device being installed to, we can avoid the whole thing that Android does with binaries​ where they package every architecture into an apk and let the installer chose the one to use. I want this OS to be easy on RAM, CPU time, and as a result have much better battery life. So... 6-8 months is the timeframe I've given myself to make platform developers can build on, but it could be more or less depending on how I exactly do everything and what FOSS stuff I use compred to how much I build myself. I am a minimalist programmer who thinks that programmer today just use tools and code that is easy to write and less time consuming because they know most people have resources to waste, but I don't want a shred of bloat in this thing, and I want it to offer every useful feature Android+g-apps offers before rolling out the developer preview. I figure if I can find another 30-40 devs, the project could be ready to roll out as stable v1.0 in 2.5 to 3 years, and I feel like we could negotiate with IP creators to license their stuff for a cut of device licenses for manufactures using the system. It wouldn't be much money per device but if we can take large chunk of Android's market share the revenue could be significant. Maybe this is all a pipe dream but I want to do it both for myself and for the people who would want to use it, and the potential for profit isn't a bad thing to consider although there's no guarantee we'll make a single penny in the end. Since I was 7 years old and exploring the world of coding, I dreamed of doing OS development, and I realized this project has much better chance of being adopted than my homebrew x86_64 OS I've spent the last 6 years working on, so I've dropped that project and will be working on this 16-18 hours a day since my hobby is OS development and I love to take on challenges that force me to learn, adapt, and become better at what I already do and love which is coding. Sorry this has turned into a big rant but I'm done now. Any feedback positive, negative, or suggestions to modify my idea to improve what we end up with, will be greatly appreciated. You can even call me an idiot or moron but all the people who've told me I can't do things with Android have so far been proven wrong and labeled as pleb coders who think because no one else can do it, I can't... And I don't give up when I commit to something like this. The guys who said I couldn't make a Exynos/MALI 200 driver set for my custom kernels and ridiculed me for even trying were proved wrong in under 4 hours with my PoC kernel, which now has full hardware support. They said it was impossible to support undocumented hardware, they said I couldn't even make a ROM for it, and I'm beta testing the ROM I made right now as I type this post out. They said I couldn't do a lot of things and all it did was make me work faster so they looked worse for being naysayer. I am going to buy a bunch of phones for development with a variety of different hardware configurations, and I'm going to have this running on all of them eventually just to stick it to those pleb Android "hackers" who mocked me for setting lofty goals. I got into this because when I started looking around at how people do these things I instantly knew my years of coding and hacking and just messing with things to learn more about them would make me a great ROM Dev, the it quickly progressed and I got into modding AOSP, modding the kernel I based mine off of, and then when I was in my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class my mind wandered from the lesson just long enough to conceive this idea before I got choked out for not paying attention.

So yeah, again. need input, need other people's ideas to add to my own, need to know if there is enough support from the community to have a full set of apps plus more in a market place in a matter of a few years. I have too many ideas at this point and I can't use them all because some of them are incompatible with other ideas I have... But work has begun and I look forward to any comments or criticism, or mocking that will encourage me to prove more people wrong. Anything you got to say, speak your mind I won't​ hold it against you, I might even respect your input and adopt your idea(s) instead of my own if it/they are better than what I've been brInstorming since the conception of this project 2 days ago.

Sent from my prototype Galaxy S5 Neo ROM(work in progress)