[pdsouza]

Sad to hear this. I was excited that an established company like Samsung was pursuing the idea of using your phone as a PC, but looks like the ROI wasn't there for them.

Fortunately, you can always come check out Maru OS [0] if you want to turn your phone into a PC. We launched in early 2016 as one of the very first projects to ride the "convergence" wave created by Ubuntu's (failed) Edge project. After this news, I guess we are the only serious project still in active development. Anyways, we're open-source and have an enthusiastic user and developer community that is always happy to welcome new members! (I am the creator)

[0]: https://maruos.com

[digdugdirk]

Wow, that looks really impressive! One thing I was struck by though was how "outdated" the phones recommended in the FAQ seemed to be - even though they're only a few years old.

What are your thoughts around working on a project that (very obviously) has value, but where you're inherently always chasing a target that's moving at breakneck speed in multiple dimensions - phone hardware, software, capabilities, feature set, etc?

[pdsouza]

Thank you man!

Yes, it's crazy how fast things change in this space. I still use a Nexus 5X (running Maru of course) as my daily driver, but by today's standards it is ancient. It is a challenge to keep up with the new hardware when you are not a fan of the "let's just buy a new phone every 2 years" mentality. But that's just the way the market rolls right now and we've got to cope with it.

I must say that being at the mercy of so many moving targets makes me nervous sometimes because you never know when Google or some phone manufacturer is going to pull the rug under you. It is already a challenge to keep porting Maru to the latest Android version since the internal APIs can change a lot. To combat this, we are stringent about keeping our modifications to the bare minimum; of course we want to provide a good experience though, and we have to think hard about whether the maintenance burden of a feature is worth it. If we owned more of the stack, we could likely do a lot more without fear of future breakage nightmares. But the truth is, it was only because we could piggyback off of Android and commodity phones that we were able to get Maru built with minimal investment.

That being said, we are continuing to improve our process so we can support the latest and greatest phones since our current velocity is frankly way too slow. We've been investing in automation a lot (continuous builds, documentation, etc.) to free up cycles. Another thing is, we are open-source, and I think the critical factor to boost Maru's velocity is making sure our developer community has the knowledge, support, and tooling to pitch in without fear. Crowdsourcing the development effort is the only way we can keep up in the long run!