For our July 2018 “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected dotOS 2.x – O, an Android Firmware based on Android Oreo. Founder and Head Developer Mohan CM shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the dotOS project please.
Mohan CM (MC): dotOS is a custom firmware which is highly optimised and with a properly designed User Interface. Basically a Custom Android OS.
SF: What made you start this?
MC: I was always passionate about Android and the things revolving around it. I became part of the Android Community in 2014 and will be an Integral part of it forever. With the time moving on, I gained some knowledge about Android things and the Core part of it. I wanted to bring something Unique and point out what other roms lack. We initiated this project to provide great user Experience and with the concern of bounding stability and performance.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
MC: I would say yes. We got a good response from our community and we are constantly improving and fixing things day by day.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
MC: The Android community and the people who are likely to install custom roms. As they prefer custom roms over stock roms, they get full freedom to explore and customise their software to the fullest. It’s an open source project so that anybody can contribute to it and can make a build for their device.
SF: What core need does dotOS fulfill?
MC: Customisation at its core, simple and stable!
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using dotOS?
MC: Bringing the new things and maintaining the source as stable.
SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
MC: Yes. We started with the strategy of releasing on a weekly basis, although we have Jenkins server, which automatically compiles builds in that respective manner. This helps us to get valuable reviews, bug reports for sorting out issues.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
MC: Amazing UI experience and Android P styled features.
SF: What helped make that happen?
MC: Ofc, our dedication, commitment and passion towards Android brought us to achieve something. Most credit goes to my community and my teammates. They helped me in an awe-inspiring manner. Most of the things went right, because of my team!
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
MC: Sourceforge is one of the backbone of dotos, a means of hosting our builds.
Whatever devices we maintain officially and support by our project, all those builds are pushed to Sourceforge as it provides the best mirrors, all over the world.
SF: What is the next big thing for dotOS?
MC: Better UI experience and Android P styled features and more importance in maintaining source stability.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
MC: Until the release of android p officially by Google. We have a plan to work and maintain source up to date.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
MC: We had, now due to some issues we don’t have a dedicated server to maintain Gerrit and Jenkins 🙁 We need a dedicated server.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for dotOS?
MC: Nothing substantially. But will maintain in better manner and extend support to acquire more devices.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
MC: If you help us in providing direct links for our project (only for ota update app), that would be appreciated. Outsiders will download through SF site and mirrors only.
I wonder if something like this could revive my old Samsung Galaxy S2? It’s a perfectly good phone but I only use it for internet access now. It is too slow for anything else.