I knew I couldn’t keep away from Android forever. It was only a matter of time before I jumped back into development. A lot has changed since my old rom building days. Back then everything was pre-treble, and there were no A/B partitions. That all changed for me with an Xperia XA2 Ultra.
It seems harder than I remember, and a lot more time intensive than it used to be. But, to kick things off, I started by building AOKP Pie for my new phone. To God be the glory, it does boot, but it doesn’t work right. Something is causing a pretty big hang up as soon as you are done with the setup. It locks up graphically once you get to the home screen for the first time.
Initial thoughts are perhaps tiles or menu item problems, but we will see.
Under the hood, though, everything is still running, even though the screen doesn’t update. If you use ADB, you can connect and do all the usual ADB command line stuff. But that doesn’t make for a very handy cell phone if you have to bring your computer everywhere so you can use it!
It’s also a bit harder as I had to switch to a nano sim card to be able to use the XA2. This is a problem because all of my other phones are not nano. It makes it difficult to switch to another phone while I test this out. Using a phone as your daily driver and for developing is a bit cumbersome and does slow me down quite a bit, but hopefully I’ll be able to work on it more later.
If you want to try out the “alpha” of my rom, you can download it on my MediaFire account. I will warn you, though, it doesn’t work very well.
Linux – keep it simple.