[Update] Call for help supporting devices - building and maintaining ports

B2G OS Building and Porting
#21

I would focus on devices that are: as much as affordable as possible, with good performances, with good support from OEM and easy to port.

Easy to port includes having a well supported CM subsystem, initiatives like AOSP on devices.

2 Likes
#22

Yes, one point for you, I totally agree with cheap phones, but phones like Open C are not really of good quality, even if the battery is greater than my 3GS or the screen bigger. People don’t need a phone with 16M pixels photos but a minimum of quality.
And mostly, people need phones they can find. “Hey, take a look at my super cool B2G phone ! You want the same ? Huh, I really don’t know where you can buy it :frowning:”)

#23

I would strongly recommend driving porting efforts through CyanogemMod supported devices. That will simplify the porting experience A LOT, and the amount of phones to be ported is going to be huge. Basically, this means that we have the foundation to port new CM ready devices to B2GOS almost seamlessly.

2 Likes
#24

That’s completely right, but it’s good to say it again.

#25

Anyone willing to help on this topic should investigate time on fixing builds on Android M based Gonk: currently, it is not booting at all. This should be considered a very urgent matter since CM moved to M, and new Xperia AOSP based devices (> Z3) are going to be only supported by upstream on M too. cc @Valentin

1 Like
#26

Is any device eligible for that, or has it to support M natively? If possible, I may test on flamingo (Xperia E3). After all, it is already not functioning, I don’t have much to lose…

#27

Well, let’s summarize what I think about the device to choose (I think it’s (almost) a good synthesis of what we said, with my point of view):

  • The device had to be CM 13 compatible (or have some AOSP port), with ports already working (a strong CM porting community is appreciated), and maybe a good support from the OEM (for blobs for instance) if needed.

  • We should support an affordable device, as well as a quite middle/high-end one (it depends of the user profile).

  • The device has to be widespread in the community and/or easy to find (for the Open C example, yeah it’s hard to find one (not shelled anymore), even in second hand - but almost every french firefox os users use it) - in order to not waste our time.

I would say that we have the Z3C as high end phone. The Nexus 5 is on the same category, but it could be easy to make B2G work on it, and it will evolve well.
So we will have 2 high end device.
As an affordable device, the flame is not easy to access for new contributors, we need another one. We also need to think about developing countries. So… any ideas ? A well supported sony device ?
And if we have enough help, we could choose a device in the middle. A sony again ? Another ?

And with the fairphone we have the ethical device.

1 Like
#28

Why we wont leave out the Flame? I know that it’s no longer sold, but a lot of BG2 OS developers in the worldstill have that phone as developing phone.
besides, i think that to support three differents devices for trhee diferents prices (cheap, medium and high pric) it’a very good.

#29

To be clear: the flame has to be supported, as it was the main developer phone, and it still an important one.
I was just saying that it can take the place of the affordable device: you can’t buy it right now. So for new contributors, it’s not a good solution.

But it might be a lot of efforts (9 devices).
I think 2 phones in each category it’s okay.

And obviously if more people want to help (port, build, test), we can support more devices.
But this is more a reflexion about which phone to support “officially”.

Hum… I can’t edit the poll :frowning:

#30

Then I’ll recommend a dual sim affordable device. So when I check the page from Sony support to unlock the bootloader, http://developer.sonymobile.com/unlockbootloader/unlock-yourboot-loader/ , and only the Xperia™ E4 Dual (e2115)
Xperia™ E4g Dual (e2033)
Xperia™ E dual (c1605)
Xperia™ M dual (c2004)
are affordable ,
but only the Xperia M has a CM 13 port (no mention of the dual function) : https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Nicki_Info .
It’s kind of tricky.
If I look at the list of CM 13 dual sim phone, here is what I found
Galaxy S5 Duos
and
One (M8) Dual SIM
which I’m not sure are really affordable :slightly_smiling:

It’s actually difficult to find a CM 13 supported affordable phone : https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Devices#type=“phone”;cmversions=“13”,“13.0”;

#31

For Sony devices we don’t really care about CM, as long as it is part of AOSP Open Devices program.

2 Likes
#32

You’re right I forgot that. I will edit my post.

So in your list @Thatoo I think the E4G is the most affordable with a quite correct quality, and one of the most recent too.

Maybe we can help us with some statistics, to know which phone is more popular than others.

#33

Why are you trying to add new devices when we already have a lot of them that should be working but are lacking a maintainer, that they are already easily available as second hand and thus cheap enough, while being performant enough ?

#34

Well, they are supported for firefox os, right ?
My point is to understand on which device it’s important to focus on (call for maintainer, …), if it’s an already supported one for firefox os, the porting stuff should be easier - and that’s a good point.
They can be a great choice indeed.

I’m not sure it’s clear.

#35

I am for xperia M2. The FP2 looks really nice, but is too expensive fox experiments.

#36
#37

Xperia M2 Dual is possible too?

#38

I don’t own one. It all depends on the status of AOSP support on Sony’s side.

#39

So let’s try to restart from scratch - sorry my point was unclear, this poll is quite useless:

As @lissyx explained, if we combine the Xperia devices, some nexus, fairphone 2, and the 2 dev’ phones, we already have quite a long list of phone where we should be able to run B2GOS.
So let’s get rid of that poll (I will remove it).
The priority seems to be more on the building side, and some debugging/hacking to get the build working.

So the question now is: who can help building for those devices, and maintaining those builds ?

1 Like
#40

I cannot see it on http://developer.sonymobile.com/knowledge-base/open-source/open-devices/list-of-devices-and-resources/. But I know Z3 Dual should work (support is in kernel and should be in the blobs too), so I cannot speak 100% for the M2 Dual.