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[Music]
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what is up people of the internet welcome back I know this is a midweek episode but it's a bonus episode and
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it's another long form episode do the air horns that's right that's right we all
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love a long form episode anyway uh we're back we we we will have our regular scheduled programming at the end of the
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week as usual um but just wanted to peek in this little bonus episode for you you guys so you guys excited I'm very
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excited very excited we're getting CL Thanksgiving right now thankful for a long form episode oh yeah I'm always
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thankful for a long form episode always so to spice up this episode there is
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trivia throughout yeah you never know when you might hear this
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sound okay I think that's the trivia sound that's the trivia sound just like throughout the episode okay it'll be
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happening throughout the story anytime that David mentions something I might just play this and there will be a
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trivia question that you guys have to answer okay you will win something at the end oh if this is not going towards
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our regular trivia point because wouldn't get yeah there's just just for this episode that was my chance to catch
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up yeah there is you're not you're not that far behind you will win something
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but to spice it up a little bit you guys are both starting with 20 points okay and every time you hear once again this
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sound can I you can bet points wager you can wager points based on how confident
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you are about what was just being discussed we hear the question okay so we hear what's being discussed we wager
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and then we hear the actual question of it exactly cool I'm pushing all in every time I'm pushing zero every time so
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David's talking talking he's telling a story telling a story and then all of a sudden and you guys place your bets
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David asks a question and there we go this is going to be like in school when the teacher calls in you you're like I
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just zoned out for the last five minutes okay I'm going to be laser focused lasered in you got to snap at me if you
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see drifting yeah yeah all right so I think we're just going to get right into it and as usual in the way that we get
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into these things we got to start with a lot of context history lesson that's
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right okay so we're diving we're diving back pretty far into the past to start
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it off do you guys know the website XDA Developers of course I do of course what
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what what would you say XDA Developers is man I mean that's kind of like the for the OG forums of I mean I associate
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it with Android so forums for developers software uh ROMs tweaking phones all
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these types of fun things I was I was I was much more in XDA back in I want to say like the 2009 to
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2015 sort of years yeah so that era between Android being birthed and now
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and being what it is today yeah yeah yeah okay well that's right um XDA currently and was before a very big
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roming site um for those who don't don't don't know what it means what roming means it's a website where you can go
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and you can take your devices that you're using on a day-to-day basis and dive really deep into modifying the
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software for those devices right roming is kind of a weird term right because ROM stands for read only memory and um
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you know you're installing a custom rom you're not like installing custom readon memory onto your device it doesn't
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really make sense but it just basically a term that came about because people are installing modified software onto
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the um not actually read only memory parts of their device but it's just kind of a thing that came about because they
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were installing things to a place where you're not meant to modify the software this the storage that's Michal Raman uh
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he wrote for XDA for a very long period of time and he's kind of known as the guy around the internet internet who
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digs into Android code and finds all the new features and stuff nice yeah yeah you guys probably have met him before
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right I don't know if I've met him but I've definitely seen that work where every time there's a new version of
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Android code that drops somebody's gone through the code and found the newest references to things and it becomes an article for every feature yeah I'm into
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that yeah I feel like I know XDA much more nowadays as the website that people like him post the real nitty-gritty of
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things and I'm sure we've talked about stuff he's written yeah dozens of times he does really deep into Android do you
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guys actually know what XDA and XDA Developers is supposed to refer to this feels like a trivia
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question uh I was waiting for the sound uh is it really no it's not really
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okay D does d stand for developer no that would be two developers twice yeah
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I don't know what does it stand for does X stand for xylophone no that's all I got you have any guesses or no I have
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zero guesses okay so XDA is actually really relating to the O2 XDA O2 is a
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telecommunications carrier in Europe and they had these like pdas that they
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called xdas cuz they were like extra or cool I don't know you sub out anything with X and it just sounds a lot cooler
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XDA PDA but with an X yeah PDA but with an X okay yeah it was very much like an
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early form of the smartphone like we don't necessarily consider those devices smartphones they were pdas even though
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personally I think that we should call smartphones now pdas because they are personal digital assistants more than
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they are just smart versions of phones yeah that's funny because now we the phone part is the least the least used
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part least used yeah yeah so these people want to mess around with these XDA phones right they were these early
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pdas that were a lot different from Modern smartphones mostly because they were like really closed down they all
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ran Windows mobile and it wasn't very modifiable so these people wanted to
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modify them so they're just like tweaking and trying to get performance benefits out of it and this group kind of comes together to start sharing all
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of these tweaked Colonels and ROMs that they're making right speaking of which all right Adam play the
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music trivia question number one in 2003 this group of XDA Developers started
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tweaking around with their XDA phones adding features and all this stuff what European city was this happening in a
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London B Barcelona C Oslo or D
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Amsterdam I guess I I would like to wager five of my points I would like to wager do I get to hear the question
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again because I already all the answers okay all wager five okay okay yeah are we pointing to the camera all right flip
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him and read what do you got I said Oslo I said
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Barcelona to both dang it the answer was D Amsterdam oh all right so now you both
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have 15 points okay okay all these little XDA Developers get together in
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Dam and they're modifying their Windows mobile pdas which they call xdas and
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they figure we can't be the only ones that want to do this right there's got to be a lot of people there's a lot of nerds on the planet that have these pdas
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and they're probably also modifying them and none of us are talking to each other right it's almost like the secret
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history of the internet episode where everyone realized they could be talking to each other yeah yeah and and like learning more because one everyone's
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doing separate things and getting to there if you can skip the first five steps exactly because someone's done it
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share information so they decided to launch this website called XDA Developers a site to mess with software
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and all this stuff this ended up being a huge hit really fast they grew to 100,000 members in three years which is
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wild and keep in mind this is just the O2 XDA phones wow one carrier one type
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of of like PDA and they get to 100,000 people that want to tweak their devices
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in 3 years that's actually kind of incredible and back in the day too that's a lot yeah that's between 2003 and 2006 yeah which is wild now all of
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these XDA devices were made by one company um this company called high-tech
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computer Corporation that's a horrible name is it Hightech computer they they should
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rename it I mean maybe it is a good name it's just very literal maybe they should
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like shorten it what's the acronym for that you be like Hightech wait hold on let me let me try high tech
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HTC baby yeah that's a great idea okay so let shorten it is that what that
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means Hightech computer Corporation HTC is way better without ever pretending that
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that's what it meant yeah for the Nerds out there uh HTC doesn't really make phones anymore but they have made some
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of the best smartphones of the era so yeah really really old school HTC stuff
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being made back then yep um this kind of showed the scale at which people wanted to modify their devices right there's
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this quote from Bill Joy who is the co-founder of sun Microsystems that all the smartest people don't work for us
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they work for somebody else and XDA kind of showed that was the case right because they were launching these well
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XDA Developers showed that was the case because they were launching these XDA pdas and these people were just adding
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all these features on top and they were just like making them run faster and they were making them do this and it's like why couldn't the company just do
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that cuz they don't have all the smartest people who are the most excited in the background of all this in the
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background radiation of Silicon Valley there's a man named Rich Miner he's
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working at Orange Ventures um and if you don't know orange is another Telecom
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company uh in Europe similar to like Verizon R T&T uh and Rich's company at
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the time was called Wildfire Communications it was this very early
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form of basically Siri yeah do you know about this company you seem like you know about this
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company I this might be a total coincidence but there was a phone called HTC Wildfire do that have anything to do
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with this I don't know okay that's the only re total sounded familiar like
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wildfire I doubt it um yeah like crazy enough the Wildfire ended up being what
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a lot of people consider like the Godfather of Siri it was a very early digital assistant um from 1994 voice
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based assistant oh 94 which is crazy siries had that long and still sus
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TR yeah exactly um wait David not to interrupt you but I can come in with a
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confirmation that the HDC Wildfire is not named after Wildfire Communications
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but in the most 2011 turn of events ever it was named by a Facebook
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poll o 2011 man what a time what a time so rich sells Wildfire Communications to
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Orange um and he became an orange employee and they bought it because they wanted to offer this personal digital
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assistant voice assistant to their subscribers um little fun fact they shut
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it down in a couple of years because no one was using it okay but because he was acquired by orange he became this orange
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employee and he quickly joined the orange Ventures team and uh a lot of these big corporations have these
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Venture arms that just allow them to like invest in other companies that would be good for the company right and
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over the next couple of years uh all of the sort of like smart PDA phones that
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coming out are Windows mobile phones and Windows mobile phones and Windows mobile
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phones um somebody's got to do something about that yeah exactly and I just got a little worried
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when we were doing that because um I felt like boy if if Microsoft owns the
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mobile phone space we're going to repeat some of the things that we saw in the laptop space where there's one word
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processor one spreadsheet like it felt like we might not have an Innovative platform if if if the platform is tight
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controlled and so that's rich Miner uh we got him on the phone for this story now because rich is working at
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Orange Ventures um he has the opportunity to invest in some companies for Orange right because he kept seeing
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these Windows mobile devices pop up over and over and over again he starts to get really interested in like device
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diversity of operating systems because he just didn't want the same thing that happened in personal Computing where
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everything got Consolidated to like you've IBM and you've got Apple and
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Windows releases windows and you can only use one application like it's just not a good time right um so he's like
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okay if these pdas are like early smartphones are growing out we need to make sure that there's a lot of competition I don't just want to see 2.0
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of the same thing so he's at um orange Ventures and he gets in he gets
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interested in projects like Sava J I think it's supposed to be pronounced Savage um but it's a it's an early like
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Java based for for devices like this basically any OS that could create richer mobile
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experiences that were already available um and one of the companies that really caught his interest was this company
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called danger who made a device called the danger hiptop also known as how much do you
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guys want to I want to Danger hiptop yeah the danger hiptop was the other uh
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more popular name for that device you guys both have 15 points I I'll wager two points you start
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wagering lower yeah I'm wagering one point one point all right all right you
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ready what do you think it is danger say it again danger hip toop what do I think
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it is the more common name for the danger hip top pretty sure this was already a trivia question is it really I
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don't even know what to
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right [Laughter]
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all right all right flip them and read laptop I just wrote laptop and
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beeper Noe no um this is a device by a company
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called danger right so it was also called the sidekick the T-Mobile
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Sidekick that was called The Hip toop the hip top I knew that T-Mobile Sidekick 2 with phone web and more so
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danger seemed like a cool uh and smart choice to fun cuz they were doing something really new and cool right like everyone really liked the sidekick did
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you did you guys ever use a sidekick I just saw them on TV all the time and I wanted one they did pop off weren't they
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like a T-Mobile exclusive or something yeah T-Mobile Sidekick I never owned a sidekick but I did get to try them and
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play with them in the little satisfying flip yeah they're cool there were multiple generations of them um there's a really awesome Mr mobile when phones
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were fun retrospective on the sidekick and sidekick one through like four which is really dope you watch that um anyway
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Rich decided he's going to invest in danger through orange Ventures and he's working pretty closely with them um
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because around that time one of the guys that was running danger was named Andy Ruben heard of it yeah they had been
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building this OS for the danger hiptop or T-Mobile Sidekick because it had its own OS this danger OS and it was cool
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and the OS for the sidekick was pretty Innovative like it was very different from all the like Windows mobile offerings at the time you know and so
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danger decided andot danger was like I kind of want to make another OS and I don't know it's probably one of those
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things where like you make one you just want to make something else you want to do it again and again and again right
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and so what was the OS that Andy was originally going to make supposed to be
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made for type of device Marquez you have 13 Andrew you
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got 14 what was it supposed to be made for I know this how much do you guys want wager two points two points that's
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it you really don't remember no I do if this was multiple choice I would
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get this oh man I have to go one point because I don't know it right now remember it's Andy Reuben yeah you
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know Andy Ruben yeah Andy Reuben Andy AKA Android Ruben yeah Andy Ruben's the
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guy that produced the Beasty Boys what was it what was Android for oh
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no times right running down no pressure Andre was going to be I
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know I'm wrong cuz he's thinking so hard and guessing something
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very like what feels [Music] obviously you're hearing this out loud I
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know it I just wrote tablet did you write airplane I wrote Appliance don't remember I was I hope it's not an
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airplane um okay so we got this rich rich minor quote so Andy had this kind
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of of idea of of os's for mobile devices he actually started thinking about an OS
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for camera he originally started thinking about making this OS for a
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camera yeah me too ah yeah and then he was like oh know
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it should be about the phone and I agreed yes we need an open OS for the phone so I had invested in danger as a part of a venture fund I started at
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Orange uh talked to Andy about what he was doing with Android and and had my
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thesis about why I thought we needed and carriers needed and oem's needed an open mobile phone OS as opposed to a a
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tightly controlled mobile phone OS like we might get with Nokia like you might get with Microsoft Rich was like yes we
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definitely need an OS for phones right this is kind of an aside but do you guys realize how much it sucked to be a
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developer back in the like PDA feature phone days an OS developer or an app Dev an app developer no you couldn't just like
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upload your app to an open Marketplace you had to like go to individual
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carriers because a lot of carriers had phones that only came out on that carrier like the O2 XDA or the T-Mobile
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Sidekick to make carrier you had to go to T-Mobile and you had to say hey we're building this app that does this thing
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do you think you could maybe put it on the T-Mobile sidei can we be bloatware please yeah and then T-Mobile yeah would
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basically be bloatware and then T-Mobile would be like well what's in it for us yeah that's terrible yeah it sucks
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there's like no way to like how are you going to be incentivized to build apps if that's the process that you have to
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go through that's awful so rich and Andy are sort of also thinking about like how
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do we like encourage development here because it sucks to have the the carriers have all of the control we
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really need to push this through so rich gets really hyped about Android because he's like yeah open OS we should make an
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open OS we should make this OS that doesn't just like you don't build this OS for this particular phone that goes on a particular carrier you build an OS
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that can be used on multiple things so that you you don't just have HTC phones or you don't just have danger phones you
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know you can just make it for everything and everyone can just build their own apps and it all works and it's open source and all this stuff um and so he
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gets hyped about this he joins the Android team as a co-founder and they start getting uh to
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work on Android for the next two years or so in 2005 they're out trying to
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raise money for the company because they have to make money so they're looking for their series a um and for those that
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don't know when you're startup you can go around and get different rounds or series of funding it's basically like
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we're building this thing do you want to invest like if you invest it basically keeps us around because we have to pay
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our employees all this stuff um so Andy and Rich aren't actually look looking
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for Android to get like acquired they just thought that it would be really dope to have this open OS so they could
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go to HTC and they could go to Samsung and they could go to LG and Motorola and
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be like you guys should use our OS and you can can like pay us to use it licensing fees and stuff but Android the
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company the OS maker is a separate Corporation they didn't really want to like be acquired they just wanted to
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raise funding yeah um and they ended up going to Google to kind of see like you
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know if they could have a Google phone that used the Android OS that would be pretty dope for their pitch deck because
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Google was already a huge company at this point in time and they could go around and it would be a lot easier for
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like them to get Samsung or HTC or interested and we actually found this YouTube video on the internet where rich
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says and uh and as we went out and started to pitch we were happened to be
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a Google Google was already funding um the Mozilla open source project at that point in time it was kind of this thing
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where like a lot of the companies were funding these open source projects because they didn't want like Microsoft
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or any of these other giant Tech corporations to have all the ownership and stuff cuz if you fund open source
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then there's a lot more competition and it's not all Consolidated right so Google had been going around and already
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trying to like help open source kind of get underway um so Google was like yeah no
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you need some help with that we're going to we're going to we're going to buy you so things start moving really fast after
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that remember this is still 2005 um and Andy and rich on the team are building the thing there's actually a really
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great book by Chad Hass um I recommend called Androids the team that built the Android operating system um that kind of
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details like the early years of them building this but then two years later it's
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2007 do you guys remember what happened in 200 2007 I do do you want to wager
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that oh just name something that happened name anything that happens in 2007 I'll wer all my what was what was
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the biggest thing that happened in Tech in 2007 I'll wager everything I got Marquez you have 12 so you're wagering
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at all I'm wagering 12 Andrew you also have 12 how much are you wagering oh 12 all
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right wait they're going deep in you got it you're going all for it they're all in they're all in let's see if it would
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be a shame if I'm wrong cuz I don't have any points left yeah what happens when if we're both at zero I'll have to rethink the game on SP back in I'll buy
00:22:14
back in all right you ready flip them and read boys oh thank goodness iPhone
00:22:20
the iPhone that's right an iPod a
00:22:26
phone and an internet Communicator an
00:22:33
iPod a phone are you getting
00:22:41
it these are not three separate devices this is one
00:22:51
device and we are calling it
00:22:56
iPhone to today today apple is going to reinvent
00:23:03
the phone it's funny cuz when you were talking about this before as like revolutionary how can we get more things
00:23:09
developing for this Market I was like wait but we're getting pretty close to like the iPhone also where does that
00:23:16
come in yeah right so the iPhone gets launched and Google's like in the
00:23:21
background they're developing Android they had been developing Android for two years but yeah so it was already like in
00:23:27
process and they're like okay um we need to turn up the heat because Apple just
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launched this major thing and so the public V of Android 1.0 launched on
00:23:38
November 5th 2007 which was like immediately after couple months later a couple months later cuz they were like
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it doesn't matter that it's not done yet we just need to put out a beta for it so that people start developing for it
00:23:51
because we need to get this in the hands of people and it needs to have an app store and all this stuff very googly
00:23:57
thing to do yeah and yeah send it exactly yeah yeah it's actually kind of
00:24:02
their motto in 2007 it's kind of what apple is now doing with division Pro it's kind of what Google's doing with
00:24:08
Bart or what Microsoft's doing with you don't really you don't really build on top of Bart though I guess the whole oh
00:24:16
it's it's kind of happening right now we need to send it oh that moment but yeah I feel you yeah the
00:24:22
Vision Pro thing is like this isn't out yet but we need apps when it is out so please now right right that's kind of
00:24:29
what Google was doing cuz they didn't even have a device there was no Android phone you just had to do it on a computer yeah wow you know so that
00:24:36
launched on November 5th 2007 and the first official Android phone launched in
00:24:42
September 2008 and what was that
00:24:48
phone everything I got I'm just four Andrew I hear 24 points you're risking
00:24:54
at all four fouring 20 of my 24 there are two common
00:24:59
names for this device and I will accept [Music]
00:25:07
both I'm going to be mad mad if this is right but I think it's
00:25:14
wrong I think I'm missing something beforehand interesting okay and I know
00:25:19
Marquez is it right flip them and read Marquez says HTC TMobile G1 correct
00:25:28
and I said they she siis no but that's okay they really gave that
00:25:34
phone both a track ball and a keyboard I had the ER full the G the G1 that's the
00:25:39
full it had a track track a track ball and it had a slot out not a slide but a
00:25:44
slot out screen yeah it was a weird mechanism it was awesome it was a hinge
00:25:50
it was pretty sick yeah it was cool I wanted one so bad so Android's officially out and on a phone in
00:25:57
September 2008 just a year after the iPhone launches even though it had been developed in the background since 2005 H
00:26:03
actually kind of since 2003 now I want to flip it back to XDA for a second uh
00:26:09
keep in mind that they were founded specifically as a Windows Mobile moding Blog for the O2 XDA and the O2 XDA only
00:26:18
mhm which is wild but there was writing on the wall right like Microsoft is kind
00:26:23
of the last company that wants you to modify their OS anyway so it was very difficult to have like modify these O2
00:26:30
phones um and then this new OS comes out from Google of all companies which is a
00:26:36
huge tech company that is kind of founded on being open sourced and modified like everyone on XDA wants to
00:26:44
just move to that right that makes a lot of sense so I found a couple of different sources for this um but
00:26:50
there's a blog post from XDA Developers from 10 years ago called the history of XDA Developers which is funny
00:26:56
considering it's from 10 years ago yeah um and it says that it took until 2009
00:27:02
the next year for XDA to realize that they should be allowing Android phones on the forums because it was really originally just for Windows mobile
00:27:08
phones but if you look back um there were people developing for the team the HTC dream T-Mobile G1 like pretty much
00:27:16
immediately after it came out I forgot it was called The Dream also HTC dream baby yeah um anyway as soon as that
00:27:23
comes out it just starts buzzing like the Android development is going and
00:27:29
there's kind of this idea that like they had to rush it out because of the iPhone anyway so it was kind of Unfinished you
00:27:34
know so all these developers get their g1's and they're just like we can modify this we can make it amazing and we're
00:27:41
allowed to yeah we're allowed to do encouraged even no I mean Android was awesome right like the the iPhone when
00:27:46
it first came out was really expensive it didn't have an app store it was super locked down and then you have this other
00:27:51
option where you were encouraged to modify your device there was this awesome like launch phone that came out
00:27:58
that everyone was buying it was super cool for for perspective the modifying the iPhone software was called
00:28:04
jailbreaking yeah that's how locked up it was yeah it was pretty locked up yeah jailbreak yeah yeah yeah um and all of a
00:28:11
sudden all of these ROMs start getting put on XDA right because when you take Android and you start modifying it
00:28:17
yourself you can call that your own ROM you know you're you're making it look the way you want you're adding the
00:28:23
features that you want it's not like all these people on XDA are like working on one project they're working on a bunch of different project so there's all of
00:28:28
these different ROMs coming out there's slim ROMs there's Paranoid Android there's dirty unicorns used I used both
00:28:34
of those that's right that's right those are some Throwbacks man Throwbacks I know and people are like people are just
00:28:41
flashing stuff every single day right like that and keep in mind when you flash a new ROM to your phone it
00:28:47
completely wipes your phone of all apps and all memory and all photos and this was the part this was the time that I
00:28:53
really good at setting up new phones cuz I was flashing new ROMs and new updates like every time there's a new DOT
00:28:59
version update of like Paranoid Android and Flash new kernel new ROM like every couple days yeah totally wipe everything
00:29:05
there were some ROMs that were bigger that had that had teams that were working on them that would do nightly so
00:29:10
they would add new features every single night and in the morning you would wake up and you would flash your phone and it
00:29:17
would wipe all of your data and you'd have some slight performance boosts it would be awesome it was awesome it was
00:29:22
sick but there was one ROM that would kind of change the way that we thought about Android roming overall and the
00:29:28
drama that would unfold because of this ROM in the tech world was
00:29:34
legendary I love this drama this drama is epic but we'll get to it after the
00:29:47
break welcome back to continue our story it's 2008 the HTC dream T-Mobile G1 just
00:29:55
came out and in November of 2008 which again is like immediately after the
00:30:00
T-Mobile G1 come out um this username Jesus Freak emerged on XDA nice but
00:30:08
freak is spelled f r e k which do you know what that means no oh what is
00:30:15
freaking what does freaking mean what does freaking mean f r e k how much do
00:30:20
you guys want a wager I'll wager Four Points I will wager one point
00:30:27
Point um flashing flashing a ROM no mine's so vague that it's probably not
00:30:34
right I wrote modding no okay no okay he was ready to say no so phone freaking uh
00:30:40
is something that people used to do with payones where they would play sounds into the pay phone which would allow
00:30:45
them to make free phone calls because each number is a specific tone toneal all it is is it's you didn't have to pay
00:30:53
you didn't have to pay for the the phone if you were able to play the right sounds the all that's happening on a pay
00:30:59
phone is you're picking it up and it's listening and when you dial those numbers turn the speaker on Andrew
00:31:04
that's that's how any dialing of a phone works really yeah like it's using the actual like my smartphone right Ellis's
00:31:10
quick audio lesson on a nine button phone or I guess
00:31:17
there's 12 buttons the rows are all One Tone and the columns Are All One Tone so
00:31:24
you it's actually each button is playing two tones in Harmony decided by the coordinates the frequency interaction
00:31:31
between those tones is picked up at the other end and it is connected to a logic board that puts it all together it's all
00:31:37
Sonic so you can dial a phone just by putting a speaker up to a phone
00:31:43
and this is only like landline phon correct land CU I think a lot of people
00:31:49
listening right now phone means very different there are some people alive who think they can do this on their smartphone that's not what we're talking
00:31:55
about but I literally have never I can't I've never heard they used to make these little devices and you could go up to a
00:32:00
pay phone and like call someone by just playing into the payone for free that's hilarious yeah it was epic wow anyway
00:32:06
yeah Jesus Freak which was a fun little play on words unreal yeah so this user
00:32:12
emerged on XDA as the quickly as the maintainer of the most popular Android
00:32:18
ROM at the time and again the HDC Dream came out in October of 2008 he was the
00:32:24
most popular one on XDA by November of 8 so he spent all of his time just
00:32:30
immediately going and roming this phone right and this is people just in their free time it's not like a full-time job
00:32:36
this is just because you wanted to there's no you're not getting paid to mod on on XDA right he's got this quote
00:32:44
he basically says that uh he pre-ordered his G1 so he was one of the first people to get one and he sort of had to play
00:32:51
this cat and mouse game because there was this Infamous root bug that didn't allow him to have root access so he had
00:32:57
to try to figure out how to patch that bug to give him root access and he got root access and then they updated it and
00:33:02
it took away root access and so he just starts basically going back and forth but he had this awesome ROM out called
00:33:09
JF ROM that everyone just started using for the G1 by the way root on your phone means that you have access to the root
00:33:15
directory which is this primary folder where like everything is stored from um and the reason that you usually don't
00:33:20
have root access on a device is because it's like if you just if you delete system 32 on your computer like the
00:33:27
primary folder that everything else branches from you could break everything with you break everything with r AIS so
00:33:33
yeah which we've all done from time to time yeah yeah uh and then in May 2009
00:33:39
Jesus Freak was hacking away making JF ROM and this user named Cyanogen made
00:33:45
their first blog post on XDA with the title Cyanogen MOD optimizing the crap
00:33:52
out of Android 1.5 release 2 and effectively they were just making
00:33:57
a bunch of modifications to Jesus freak's ROM and enhancing it they were forking the ROM interesting so they they
00:34:04
didn't Fork Android they Fork Jesus Freaks ROM exactly interesting yeah that's why it's called Android right
00:34:10
they've got they've got Android open source project JF ROM another Fork
00:34:15
Cyanogen MOD got it um so the user's name was Cyanogen and their ROM was called Cyanogen MOD you know it's just
00:34:22
like you know what I found is this this huge project that has all these things that you can hack on and you know it's
00:34:30
open source and with a little bit of work you could build it for this phone and actually like run it and use it
00:34:36
every day so that's Stephanie condic aka the Cyanogen um we were finally able to get in touch with her for this episode
00:34:42
it was very hard to track her down um but thanks to Shen for getting us in
00:34:47
contact wow shout out to Shen yeah if you don't know who Shen is he uh works at HTC on Vive and he seems to know
00:34:55
literally everyone been on the show before also been on the show before he's a really awesome guy he knows
00:35:01
everyone that is Shen right there if audio list we have a giant cardboard cut out of shen but a quick trivia question
00:35:09
what was Shen's first job how much you guys want a wager are you saying like first job ever um first job are we
00:35:17
supposed to know what Chen's first job was first job on his LinkedIn on his LinkedIn dog walker I have no idea uh I
00:35:24
do you guys want a hint I would are we wagering after the hint sure sure do
00:35:29
they have to wager for this this is really hard hint sounds great he's told me before oh we've been talking about it
00:35:35
on and off this entire time yeah okay I'll go with what I was going to guess then okay I'll wager two points two
00:35:42
points Andrew I'll waiter two points marz has 4 Andrew has 19 I just
00:35:48
want to say Andrew carry the one has 19 and Marquez is 40
00:35:55
um that's furiously that's so innocent I
00:36:02
don't think mine I'm wrong but I want it to be right I really want to know what you wrote now all right
00:36:10
ready flip them and read all right flip him and read oh you're a moderator XDA
00:36:17
moderator XDA developer reporter I'll do both yeah he was uh the XDA TV producer
00:36:24
from oh what TV producer I used to watch xcv videos he produced those oh is that
00:36:32
insane anyway that was a quick aside um more Stephanie quotes I don't know for like somebody who's an engineer you know
00:36:38
I hate whenever I have a product that like there's a bug in it and and I can't fix it like I I wish you you know like I
00:36:45
can help you with this please let me you know I mean but I understand why the world doesn't work that way
00:36:51
unfortunately but maybe it could be better if it did uh at the time everything was really new so um things
00:36:58
performed really poorly to say the least right there were there was a lot of things that you could do to increase the
00:37:05
performance so um you know I knew a lot about that from like working on like
00:37:10
data center systems and stuff like that and you know like really like tuning Linux and all that so um you know I just
00:37:18
really kind of dug in there and tried to make something that went faster and felt like a nicer thing to use you could just
00:37:25
make it better yeah you just make it better make it better it's like this but is like make
00:37:32
yeah right so especially if you're especially if you're an engineer and you're just like using these products and they just have all these issues and
00:37:37
it's like you could just you just want to be able to do that but that company doesn't let you mess with it that's frustrating so then you get Android and
00:37:44
it's like it's amazing you can just you can just make your device better you can just do whatever you want to it so Jesus
00:37:50
Freak and sanen are kind of working on their own stuff um sanen mod was a fork of the JF ROM and then JF was its own
00:37:57
little thing and then on August 20th of 2009 Jesus Freak decides it's a little
00:38:02
too much work he just kind of calls it quits he's like this is I just don't want to do this anymore I'm kind of bored um but he does do one last thing
00:38:10
on his way out he recommends that everyone using his ROM which remember was the most popular ROM for the G1 on
00:38:16
XDA Developers move over to cyanin mod remember that yeah I was going to say you mentioned drama before and I assumed
00:38:23
the drama was going to stem from one mod com so much off of one that already was
00:38:29
there okay so it's the opposite it's kind of the opposite they're friends yeah yeah they're friends so from here
00:38:35
Cyanogen MOD just starts growing super fast um Stephanie publishes the whole thing to GitHub so other people can add
00:38:41
to it and mess with it right because usually it's just one person update updating it and you download that but
00:38:46
then she puts on GitHub so then people can like they can Fork it they can they can add things to the core the core
00:38:52
build and everyone just starts like kind of jumping on this unofficial team and I'm resp responsible for this feature
00:38:57
and maintaining this phone and you're responsible for maintaining this phone and it was kind of cool cuz there would just be new phones that come out you're
00:39:03
one of the first people to buy it you're like oh I really want to get S engine mod on this oh it's not available yet I'm going to be the person on XDA that
00:39:09
maintains San engine mod for this device yeah and it was just no one's getting PA
00:39:14
Heroes unsung heroes absolutely the heroes of my college career exactly I love those people yeah so this is going
00:39:21
the community is thriving everything's great um I just remember loving loving the ramen community so much cuz everyone
00:39:28
was so friendly you could just flash all these different ROMs and it was it was amazing uh but then in 2009 there was
00:39:34
this event that happened that the media dubbed cyano gate and basically sanen
00:39:40
got a cease and assist letter from Google which is scary and Stephanie starts freaking out right she's like
00:39:47
damn this could be the end I'm scared like maybe I should shut this down like imagine you and a bunch of friends are
00:39:53
just kind of like doing this fun project for no reason and then some company comes out of the gate and sends you a season assist letter yeah like if you
00:40:00
had a website called League of Legos and then just like a company just yeah I on
00:40:05
the other hand never did anything with the website but San engine mod was a real thing uh but basically the problem
00:40:12
and the reason that Google sent them to CE and desis letter was that they were Distributing Google Apps specifically
00:40:17
the Android market um and this one thing happened where sanmon had distributed a
00:40:23
newer version of Android market version 1.6 before Google even publicly released
00:40:29
itz do you know how that happened or because it gets put in uh
00:40:34
AOSP but Google had not put it like on a device yet and so they were really upset about that okay yeah that's
00:40:41
understandable can I hop in here yeah boys um it's important to note that at this point in history there's a very
00:40:50
very very murky line between AOSP like the Android open source project and then
00:40:56
Google Google apps at this point like Google apps are getting shipped on every version of the open source Android
00:41:02
project but whether or not Google apps are open source themselves yeah is not clear was defined I remember that moment
00:41:09
it was very unclear and so basically this uh lawyer just comes and is like
00:41:15
hey it's against our terms of service to ship our apps right because AOSP is open sourc and you can ship AOSP but you
00:41:21
can't be shipping Google Apps very YouTu Gmail Google calar
00:41:27
gole Play Store App Store Android Marketplace Android Marketplace at the top Android Market Market sorry yeah so
00:41:36
Stephanie ended up working with Google on this they did talk it through it ended up not being as scary as she thought it was going to be like she
00:41:42
thought it was that was the end they were going to shut her down but it kind of was just a like stop like
00:41:48
Distributing our apps but like we're not going to stop you from making your ROM like keep doing your thing so it's at
00:41:54
that point in time where every time you romed something or you added a you flashed a ROM you had to both install
00:42:01
the ROM and you had to Sid load um something called the gaps which is the Google apps package yep yeah so you
00:42:09
would you would flash this ROM onto your phone but you didn't have any Google Play services or any Google apps so it it's kind of useless so you had to force
00:42:16
the Google apps onto your phone so that you could have Google Play services you could use Gmail and Google Maps and all of this different stuff so so many
00:42:23
memories yeah it was a whole process like it got a little bit harder to ROM your phone it just took longer it was just two flashes instead of one it was
00:42:30
two flashes instead of one yeah it wasn't a big deal so luckily uh Google kind of left Cyanogen MOD alone after
00:42:35
that they hadn't gone after any of the other ROM developers but Cyanogen MOD at that point was the biggest so they kind of just made an example out of them and
00:42:42
Stephanie says like it was probably just like one lawyer that just got a little trigger happy you know just needed something to
00:42:48
do I mean like my heart definitely sank whenever I got it why are they coming after us like you know this is like a
00:42:55
you know like you know we're helping them people from the community are like you know submitting all this code back
00:43:00
to Google and you know we are like you know we're creating features that
00:43:06
they're like copying and including in you know in in Android later on and stuff that was what struck me the most
00:43:12
because I remember there would be features that you'd see in Cyanogen MOD or some random mod and then one and a
00:43:17
half versions later that would show up in Android whether lock screen shortcuts or little settings tweaks or something I
00:43:24
see that I'm very confident I made a video about how that kept happening how
00:43:29
these modifications of Android just kept getting swallowed into what Google would
00:43:34
ship it's kind of like sherlocking right yeah yeah yeah it's like we're just going to take your ideas cuz all the
00:43:40
smartest people don't work for us we don't have to do the bleeding edge like modifications ourselves we can just see
00:43:46
what catches on and then once one of them catches on well enough then we're like all right seems like people really like this we it there's kind of a lot
00:43:52
but they work through it they keep moving on with S engine mod uh kind of out of nowhere Stephanie lost her job um
00:43:58
which was kind of rough for her but she ended up moving to Seattle because she got a call from no one other than Jesus
00:44:04
Freak Jesus Freak was working for Samsung at the time and a couple of other people that had been roming on XDA
00:44:10
interesting and he's like hey we're doing this work for Samsung they' they kind of have us in this like Innovation
00:44:16
Zone and this was like the peak point of the Samsung versus iPhone kind of fight
00:44:23
when it it was like the Samsung phones were really the Flagship Android phones right yeah so Samsung was like we need
00:44:30
to like work up our our war chest against Apple we have to come up with as many features as possible so that people
00:44:37
really want to use Samsung phones so they basically just recruited a bunch of the modders from the XDA forums that's
00:44:43
not a bad idea which is a pretty smart thing to do super smart yeah and I think that this is actually one of the reasons
00:44:48
why um Samsung OS Samsung mod not mods
00:44:53
Samsung's OS has like a zillion features that you never really use right there
00:44:59
are videos all over the Internet of like all of the things that one one UI has that you had no idea you could do that's
00:45:06
built into one UI and I think a lot of those are a result of these XDA people grabbing tons of people to come in and
00:45:12
work for them for anything that'll stick yeah yeah just make anything that'll stick which is really awesome a year
00:45:17
into this Stephanie is still working on cyan engine mod in a free time I still have no idea how she managed to like
00:45:23
work full-time for Samsung and do cyan engine mod every night and put out nightly every night I guess I'm also
00:45:29
surprised Samsung's letting her do that right like if I were Samsung i' would be like I want all of your best stuff right
00:45:35
here under our we asked her about that and she said that it was just kind of a like we don't talk about it kind of
00:45:41
thing okay yeah which is cool that's the coolest Samsung has ever sounded I know
00:45:46
wow wow well this was like back in like Galaxy S 3 days you know yeah so she's working for Samsung and she's running
00:45:51
sanen mod at the same time but she sudden uh she gets this call from this
00:45:57
man named Carl pay H out of nowhere never heard of
00:46:03
him and she also gets a call from a man named Kurt McMaster um so you guys probably know
00:46:10
Carl P he's somehow still in the vernacular of the tech scene because he
00:46:15
runs a company called nothing that man stays relevant he stays IR relevant yeah
00:46:21
uh at the time he was this upper manager guy for Oppo and he calls up and he's
00:46:26
like what do you think about making a phone that has cyen mod as the OS yeah
00:46:32
and I think that he was just like this would be really like a community focused thing could be really cool like we can
00:46:38
make a Cyanogen phone she had actually been wanting to make a cyen first phone specifically because you would look at
00:46:44
the iPhone and you see that it's like it's this full stack phone right apple is making the OS and the hardware and
00:46:50
you really want to be able to build things into hardware and Stephanie had been frustrated that she couldn't build sign engine mod through the hardware she
00:46:57
didn't have control of that she only had control of the software and it was like on these all these phones and you couldn't you could only do so much with
00:47:03
like third party Hardware right so they start this conversation and they start to work together and they end up making
00:47:09
a limited edition phone that is running S engine mod for the Chinese market what
00:47:16
was the name of that phone how much do you guys want to
00:47:22
wager 10 points and remember this is car who was working at Oppo at the time if
00:47:27
that gives you a little heads up and also remember you know this this phone had a nonen version too they just also
00:47:33
managed they wanted to make a special edition I reviewed this phone so I should be more confident about this Andrew how much are you Andrew how much
00:47:39
are you wag five
00:47:44
[Music] five I'm like half sure yeah I'm half
00:47:51
sure well the thing I'm half sure about I'm also half sure if that's the correct thing and then I also think there might
00:47:58
be something other than this okay if that makes I think I'm I think I know what you wrote based on that okay I want
00:48:05
to hear yeah I we both have it written down what do you think I wrote I think you wrote Oppo Find one no okay I wrote
00:48:12
One Plus X Oh wrong nope I wrote Oppo N1
00:48:17
correct okay I thought like maybe it it makes more sense that it was an Oppo phone cuz didn't OnePlus was not yet a
00:48:23
thing that's okay and I'm sure we will get into that later we will get into that later forks forks forks yeah so at
00:48:31
the exact same time as this um she gets a call from this man named Kirk McMaster and there's this quote from Stephanie
00:48:36
that's like this thing happens in my life where like a lot of stuff just happens at the exact same time she had
00:48:41
Carl calling her up asking to make a phone and she gets a call from this guy named Kurt now Kurt is an interesting
00:48:47
character um you know how Mar is always making that joke that she's a 10x fintech founder and
00:48:53
CEO yeah I just hope when anyone talks about me in the future they don't say so this Andrew guy was an interesting
00:48:59
character it it does not sound like it's red flag star I kind of like it a quirky
00:49:06
fell nope nope he's definitely a quirky fella um Kurt did have a few big hits
00:49:12
for all of the companies that he was founding on a yearly basis uh he actually was the co-founder of Boost
00:49:17
Mobile which Ellis still uses for some reason let's go baby boo where my Boost customers at I'll see you on the streets
00:49:27
it's a pay you go phone service that was actually pretty successful for him uh he did some work for Sony he founded a
00:49:33
water bottle company called core water he LED digital distri distribution for Zedge that ringtone and wallpaper app
00:49:40
from decades ago uh he did work for Sega he founded a mobile game Studio he
00:49:45
founded a multiplatform trans media consumer experience whatever the heck that means his list of companies is
00:49:52
really long um serial founder very long serial founder anyway the story behind him contacting
00:49:59
Stephanie goes he had just bought a Galaxy S3 which by the way freaking amazing phone the S3 was like not good
00:50:06
enough for Kurt apparently nice little OLED screen oh it was so good it was so I pre-ordered that phone I was so excited about it but he bought a Galaxy
00:50:13
S3 and he thought or he thought it was the first Android phone that could really come close to competing with the
00:50:19
iPhone right cuz it was so good it had so many good specs it seemed cool but he
00:50:24
got it and he was really annoyed because it didn't have the latest Android version on it so the latest Android
00:50:30
version at the time was Jelly Bean but it had the one right before it and specifically Samsung used to take
00:50:37
forever to push major Android Updates this is a big touch with his fault also Samsung had this ux called TouchWiz yeah
00:50:45
um for those that don't know what TouchWiz is it was Samsung's ux at the time for their smartphones and it was
00:50:52
really bad you can tell how bad it was by the fact that it was named touch whz yeah just think about how bad it must be
00:50:58
for people to call it touch whz with a straight face what does that even mean yeah now they re they literally rebranded it to one UI because touchwood
00:51:05
has so much bad blood yeah do you remember the default touchwood wallpaper being like water or that was one of them
00:51:12
I was thinking about the one that was like a cloudy sky but then they'd have the giant weather widget which was a
00:51:18
different picture of a sky there's two separate pictures of a sky overlaid on HTC did that first HTC L ped the big
00:51:26
weather widg love that dude I loved that I love the big GTC weather widget um
00:51:33
anyway so he gets his phone he's like this doesn't have the mo like most recent version of Android this is dumb like why is Samsung taking so long so he
00:51:40
finds out about raming and he goes um and he downloads cyan engine mod for his
00:51:45
Galaxy S3 mhm and it already had Jelly Bean on it it was more stock Android
00:51:51
than TouchWiz was it was just better in pretty much every perceivable way um and he's immediately obsessed in it
00:51:58
with it uh being a 10x fintech founder and CEO he calls Stephanie pretty much
00:52:04
The Story Goes that he calls Stephanie that night the night that he flashed it on his phone he found her on LinkedIn
00:52:11
called her up and says I'll get the money and be CEO you be CTO so he saw an
00:52:16
opportunity he was like this is really good most Android ROMs are really bad or
00:52:21
most Android uxs are really bad we can make we can make a religion out of this it's like a mini Elon story yeah was
00:52:28
like Twitter seems nice how about I buy it yeah okay so well ironically if you
00:52:34
think about it this is not that different from the story of Android right when they originally pitched Android they were going around trying to
00:52:40
sell this open OS to a bunch of handset manufacturers now they're like Android kind of sucks and everyone's like
00:52:47
versions of Android suck so what if we just make a good one and we give it to everybody to use as a basis you know
00:52:54
that was kind of their pitch um so Stephanie seemed pretty into the idea because she wanted to make her own
00:53:00
device Carl pay had just called about potentially making a new company that was based around her device which is
00:53:06
also cool and he was like I'm a hardware guy Oppo is a hardware company we can make a new company that can be really
00:53:12
like really good hardware and really good software and Kurt had just showed up and it seemed like the perfect kind of mesh meshing of like I'm an engineer
00:53:21
I don't want to deal with any of the business stuff but I do want to make my own phone everyone else can kind of like do that stuff for me very quickly after
00:53:28
that Cyanogen mod kind of gets turned into Cyanogen Inc um and Cyanogen MOD
00:53:34
still existed right because there was a lot of weird Bad Blood um that was
00:53:39
happening because the community was contributing to Cen mod right it wasn't just Stephanie that was updating it it
00:53:46
was all these people that were adding to cage mod and suddenly they're like wait you're making a corporation out of the
00:53:53
work that we put into this ROM yeah you're the one making money potentially off of all the stuff that we've done at
00:53:58
this point yeah yeah yeah it wasn't it wasn't great but Kurt's big Talent was raising money uh and tons of money and
00:54:06
so he starts going around asking for Venture funding not dis similar to
00:54:12
Android and the funny thing about this is they started getting funding from pretty much everyone that had a vested
00:54:18
interest in making Google control Android less right because they didn't
00:54:23
want Google to have so much power over this thing that seemed to be one of the major like os's in the ecosystem which
00:54:31
is like one of the things that they developed that for because they didn't want Microsoft to have all of exactly
00:54:37
dude crazy how history does this thing where like it happens again it just does the same thing over and over again yeah
00:54:44
it just repeats um so yeah Microsoft invests Qualcomm invests there's a bunch
00:54:49
of these big companies that areest that's funny isn't that ironic that's incredible yeah yeah so there's this
00:54:54
kind of Legion of like anti-google Android companies that are like we want to take away Google's sheer power on
00:55:01
this o Open operating system which kind of makes sense if you're one of these other companies so Stephanie made it
00:55:07
clear that she was still going to be offering Cyanogen MOD for free to any like Cyanogen MOD right there was going
00:55:14
to be a difference between Cyanogen mod and Cyanogen Os cyen Os was the thing that they would sell to a company that
00:55:21
already had the hardware but just wanted to like have good software that they could a ship you would charge companies
00:55:26
for that and Cyanogen MOD was like if you're a regular person and you want to ROM your phone and throw cyen mod in
00:55:32
your phone you can do that for free and at this point has she left Samsung to start doing this Venture um she
00:55:38
basically left Samsung to do this I was going to say that's a lot of stuff to be doing on top of sorry Samsung yeah so
00:55:45
I'm sure Samsung wouldn't be amped about that but yeah yeah so they go around and they're raising millions of dollars in funding and it was kind of convenient
00:55:52
right because Carl P had already called and said like I kind of want to start a company based on this right but they
00:55:57
wanted they wanted to maintain control of Cyanogen so he's like I'm gonna start this spin-off company of Oppo called
00:56:03
OnePlus right so he wants to start OnePlus but he doesn't want to do software and Stephanie wanted to do
00:56:09
Hardware but she only did sare so it it's kind of this perfect merging so they already they getting funding and
00:56:15
they already have a couple of clients they've got OnePlus they've got they're signing deals with this company called Blue out of Florida and they were
00:56:22
interested in having sign in Inon on there so the launch was like a pretty huge success um the OnePlus One came out
00:56:30
with sine OS on it which was like a pretty it was a huge huge launch it was
00:56:35
kind of the original like Poco phone situation it was the OG it was like the Enthusiast phone mhm cuz when that thing
00:56:42
launched you only knew about it if you were kind of following along you were like oh okay they're going to make a phone this new OnePlus company they've
00:56:48
never made anything before like and they're not in carriers like you have to know about this stuff to see that this phone is launching it it hit pretty yeah
00:56:55
it was this community oriented device um and it was $300 Flagship build and specs and
00:57:03
everything about it was pretty amazing oh Sandstone I forgot about that that was that phone yep the original OnePlus
00:57:10
One was 299 but they also had a higher tiered version of it with more uh
00:57:17
storage the original version had 16 gigs of storage they also had one with 64 gabt of storage how much more did they
00:57:23
charge for that much more storage is this the closest
00:57:28
one um yeah sure nice without going over
00:57:34
closest without going over yeah what are you wagering two points I'll wager 15
00:57:40
points 15 big baller I have very little confidence in that 15 points
00:57:51
but I just want everyone to know that Ellis is watching marquez's OnePlus One review right now I shot that on Steven's
00:57:59
campus one of the First videos I ever shot on red oh wow one of the First videos I ever shot outside there's honey
00:58:06
nut cherios in the background what a back course outside not the arrow
00:58:12
the No No in the a-roll there's how Niger yeah in the a-roll but uh I shot the b-roll outside on campus oh and I
00:58:18
just remember being outside on campus with a red camera just like this is weird this is
00:58:23
weird all right flip them and read Marquez says $69 was the question how
00:58:29
many more dollars it was or what the price was how many more dollars so the answer is
00:58:35
$349 oh my I you have to come on give
00:58:40
him the points give him the point I'm going give Andrew that all right not for points there you go when do we think the
00:58:46
most recent comment left on this 9-year-old video was dude it could be yesterday three hours ago could three
00:58:53
hours ago 12 hours ago 12 hours ago um 15 hours ago it was 1 hour ago
00:59:00
and it says 2023 anyone nice okay anyway yeah so at the time just like insane
00:59:07
specs insane price really good Hardware really good build everything about it seemed amazing they don't make them like
00:59:13
that anymore no they just they don't yeah I would say the pixel 7 is like or the pixel 8 is like the closest thing
00:59:19
you can get like yeah maybe but it's still not it's still not like fastest chipset like it's a little different it
00:59:25
doesn't have Sandstone yeah it doesn't have Sandstone it won't it won't rip the inside of my pants so scuff endlessly
00:59:32
till the end of time yeah I still have the original Sandstone one that I had
00:59:38
looks awful looks so bad it definitely got it got the worst end of wear and
00:59:43
tear so things were going really well for OnePlus right it was kind of this random company that was like the spin-off of opa which no one in the US
00:59:50
or any other country had really heard of unless you're in China um and it seemed like maybe this could work it's just
00:59:56
that like building a phone from like some different OS had never really
01:00:02
worked before in the United States the only other place that this had worked is xiaomi and trivia qu well I just gave
01:00:09
the answer away shiai China is China all of my points I don't
01:00:15
know if you guys know this but xiaomi the brand originally started as a custom rom oh that was it got really popular
01:00:23
and eventually they just thought should build our own Hardware so they started building their own hardware and then that was really popular and so they they
01:00:30
just kept making devices and then they started they just started branching out and now one they're one of like the biggest companies in China so xiaomi and
01:00:36
OnePlus kind of started this with the same similar ethos similar however OnePlus was sort of like an Oppo thing
01:00:44
sub brand sort of oh interesting yeah so Oppo already had all like the hardware stuff whereas xiaomi was started by
01:00:50
people who worked at like Google and a few other big tech companies in but in China and they were like making their
01:00:58
own ROM and then just decided they wanted to make their own hardware for the ROM was it they made a ROM and had a
01:01:03
huge following or just like had a huge following in China in China okay yeah yeah yeah so pretty cool and they
01:01:08
thought that maybe they could make the OnePlus thought that maybe they could happen make that happen too with Canen mod it could be like this beautiful
01:01:15
pairing where everything that grows from one plus and Cen mod are like together and they become this huge company right
01:01:22
but this is where things start to get a little bit shap uh so investors were starting to
01:01:28
pressure Kurt and cyan and Inc to actually generate any Revenue at all um
01:01:34
and they didn't really have a clear path to generating Revenue there's kind of this thing that happens in Silicon
01:01:40
Valley where you pitch your idea but you have no idea how you're going to make money and then uh VCS are just like
01:01:48
acquire as many users as you can get as many users as you can like get get more people on your thing and weig figure out
01:01:54
the money later mhm um and they don't ever figure out the monetization strategy I guess so when they joined
01:02:00
with OnePlus it was just like we were kind of helping each other out here so there wasn't big money in there I'm sure
01:02:06
there was probably not a lot of big money cuz it was kind of like a launch partner thing for them was like one of the original things but their their main
01:02:12
monetization strategy is we're going to charge companies to be the OS for this device so they were charging OnePlus but
01:02:18
OnePlus was also not enough for investors not enough for investors right they wanted to they wanted to scale this like as fast as possible classic the
01:02:25
investors didn't really know what the main selling point of signage and Os was going to be like it was cool and they
01:02:31
were being very BRZ in like trying to start this thing that Google owned but it was sort of an anti-google thing
01:02:38
because you're sort of starting it in Google's like in Androids own ashes and it's just weird and they wanted to
01:02:43
remove market dominance from Google while being a subproduct of a Google
01:02:49
product it just seemed strange yeah I mean you got to be worried about that at any time where if your entire product is
01:02:54
is based off of something and then you breach into that something space a little too much are you worried about
01:03:00
losing I think the only reason that a lot of these investors felt okay um giving them money and not like not
01:03:07
worrying that Google was just going to like shut them down at any minute was that Google would probably get in some
01:03:13
weird antitrust territory if they were like this is open source and then they and then they like shut down a thing
01:03:19
that starts competing with them you know yeah so that's why they felt okay with doing it um um yeah but they just wanted
01:03:25
to acquire as many users which was a problem then bigger business problems started to emerge OnePlus had planned to
01:03:32
sell the OnePlus One in a lot of countries uh including India and if you know OnePlus One of their primary
01:03:38
markets is India um but Kurt had sold exclusivity rights for Cyanogen OS to
01:03:46
this company called Micromax in India which means that only microx phones with
01:03:52
Cyanogen MOD could be sold in India whoops apparently he did not communicate that to Carl and so it just got really
01:03:59
dicey really quickly um really quick trivia question what was the brand of phones in
01:04:07
India that was under the microx brand it was a sub brand of Micromax that ran Cyanogen and this these are the most
01:04:13
numerous devices that have run Cyanogen OS think uh soldja
01:04:19
boy how much do you guys want a wager how many points do I have Mar TZ has 54
01:04:25
Andrew with one two carry the one careful Andrew there careful Adam there was a Reddit post saying anyone think
01:04:32
that Adam's joke about Andrew's score is getting a little disagree and then somebody was just like Andrew needs to
01:04:38
pick it up and the original posters like yeah he does so we're good we're oh my god
01:04:46
listen I only got one joke all right I think I'm entirely too confident about this when I'm oh my God all in TZ did
01:04:54
you plant a counter one point what I don't know the answer I just straight up
01:04:59
don't know it I can't I can't lose points here I don't know I don't know the answer marz says Vivo I wrote
01:05:08
Alcatel say with me on three one 2 3
01:05:14
you I thought the soldier phone was a white label Alcatel phone so that's what
01:05:19
I want you tell is a thing though it uh it is this is you Ventures any anyway
01:05:25
this gets really dicey really fast it starts to be this like allout public dispute that you can watch in real time
01:05:32
happening on the internet between Carl pay and uh Kurt McMaster and it was kind
01:05:38
of beautiful to play out um Carl publishes this letter on the OnePlus forums that's just like I'm paraphrasing
01:05:45
this because it's a bit long but he says this week we announced the OnePlus One will finally launch in India on October
01:05:51
7th cyen released an update to comply with Indian regulations which means that the phone would be able
01:05:56
to the OnePlus One was actually going to be able to work on Indian carrier markets right therefore it was
01:06:02
surprising and disappointing to hear from sanen on nov on November 26th which was a month and a half later that they
01:06:08
had granted exclusive rights in India over the Cyanogen system to another company so they update the OnePlus One
01:06:15
to be able to work in India and then the next month they're like you can't sell this in India woof woof yeah wolf energy
01:06:25
um and Carl was just very like what is going on so they start this like back
01:06:31
and forth where they're making all these public statements at each other about how the other company is trying to screw them and they're each built on the back
01:06:37
of each other's backs um the back of your back is also my back
01:06:44
you know that kind of thing but Carl does say he attributes a lot of oneplus's success to Cyanogen which is
01:06:49
probably true yeah um because you know at the time it was like there are a lot of like tiny phone brands that could
01:06:55
launch that have kind of No Name like Carl was kind of a no name he was like an upper manager Oppo but that's kind of
01:07:01
it um and the only reason that the OnePlus One became such a big hit was
01:07:07
because it it got all the Press from having cyen mod on it it's funny cuz
01:07:12
like Carl pay built a phone based on the hype of a community then the brands that
01:07:18
he created had the hype of a community that he then built a new phone off of
01:07:23
yes which Carl pay is is the original hype man yeah there are also a lot of open
01:07:29
letters from the community that are just not too kind Curt about this right cuz imagine you buy a OnePlus One to use in
01:07:36
India and then they're just like oh you can't you can't do this anymore you can't use this in India anymore easy for
01:07:42
them to pick sides yeah it was it was a problem at the last minute because they could not use Cyanogen OS they had to
01:07:48
build another OS which was called oxygen OS yep so OnePlus had to spin up this
01:07:55
new OS because it couldn't use Cyanogen OS it ended up being one of the most popular os's in the Android like world
01:08:02
for a very long time and it was actually not that different from cyan n OS it was very stock Android very clean very fast
01:08:09
and that was not anymore well now it's color again well they made it color and
01:08:15
then they renamed it back to oxygen just because people thought they were different even though they're exactly the same yeah it's all naming
01:08:21
conventions and stuff but things just got worse from there every time cyan enging seemed to land some big deal
01:08:27
things just kind of stopped working um and there's even this crazy thing that Stephanie says that not a lot of people
01:08:33
know about that ended up probably being the death blow for the company you know we were working on a project um with uh
01:08:42
with a couple with a large US carrier partner and a large manufacturer in
01:08:48
China and it was going to be the mod phone right we had in we you know we
01:08:54
hired industrial designers um the manufacturer built like the first versions of it um it had this like you
01:09:00
know really cool industrial design and we were bringing all these features to it it was going to ship on a major carrier we had all the stuff in place
01:09:08
and um like the worst thing happened um the
01:09:15
manufacturer um got hit with a trade embargo from the FTC um
01:09:22
and that basically killed the whole project H can you imagine what would
01:09:27
have happened if a Cyanogen branded phone got launched on a major US carrier
01:09:34
that would have been a very different path yeah for the for the history of Android yeah wow very different right
01:09:42
yeah and you can kind of speculate on who that major OEM might have been that got hit from this uh fine from the FTC
01:09:49
we think we kind of deduced that was probably ZTE uh because at the the time they got hit with this major major fine
01:09:57
something to do with giving a ton of money to Iran okay lots of us geopolitics going
01:10:04
on in here um but it sucks right it's like it's like sanen is just trying to
01:10:09
make their phone yeah so if you remember ZTE had launched this phone called the ZTE axon M that was an AT&T exclusive
01:10:17
might have had that phone yeah it was the one of the first like dual screen phones oh that like it had a screen on
01:10:24
each side and it would open up but it was just two separate screens it wasn't like it wasn't a foldable screen oh so
01:10:30
like the surface sort of like the surface but it didn't it didn't close in on itself it's like the outsides were
01:10:35
screens and it would open like this and it was just like flat on the back so it's a worse
01:10:41
surface an even worse surface anyway uh AT&T at the time like was more open to
01:10:47
launching more experimental devices like this what real quick year-wise what time
01:10:52
period are we talking early 2016 through mid 2016 yeah so yeah they got hit with
01:10:59
this trade embargo they couldn't do it and Stephanie has this quote that was like but that was ultimately like the downfall that's what like broke my like
01:11:06
broke my soul um you know after like we put so much effort into it you know we
01:11:12
had you know we had marketing we had you know we we had the device like it was
01:11:17
built right like it exists which is rough because they've been going out trying to do their original thing of
01:11:23
like selling the OS to everybody and that wasn't working out and Stephanie had been wanting to build her own
01:11:29
hardware for so long finally they're like we have to make money somehow okay let's build the phone they go they build
01:11:35
the phone they have everything ready it's ready to go and then ZTE messes everything up allegedly ZTE allegedly Z
01:11:44
allegedly ZTE so things start getting really bad they're not making any money investors are getting upset um they have
01:11:51
a big first round of layoffs in July then Kirk McMaster steps down as CEO how
01:11:57
many sorry how many people do you were working for them at that point don't have an exact answer but at this point
01:12:03
in time they had raised almost $100 million in total and they had two offices one in Seattle and pal Alto they
01:12:12
were like it was a flush Organization for sure okay yeah so so Kirk mcma steps
01:12:18
down as CEO and he sends this email announcing the first pivot of the company to a modular OS like they were
01:12:25
going to try to license off little bits of the OS to people that needed it okay
01:12:30
which seems strange I think he thought that like yeah like if someone wants the C engine camera then we can sort of give
01:12:37
them that selling it for parts the death rattle of a tech company
01:12:43
like well what about the parts for other things yeah so they triy to make that work but but no the next month uh the
01:12:50
Seattle office closes next month Stephanie officially leaves after she gets removed from the board because
01:12:56
she's having fights with Kurt she's having fights with the rest of the board it's it's not uh it's not great and
01:13:03
later that month in December the final build of sanen os is released and then
01:13:09
on December 24th a blog post comes out called a fork in the
01:13:15
road um this blog post was basically announcing the end and saying goodbye
01:13:20
saying that Cyanogen MOD as well could not go on because the brand was too destroyed at that point and also because
01:13:27
like other people now owned the Cyanogen brand like they couldn't even do
01:13:33
anything with it which is so depressing um but the blog post said s mod has
01:13:39
served the community well over its eight long years it's been our home bringing together their friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building
01:13:46
and giving it's apt then that on this eve of a holiday we pay our respects we take pride in our lineage and we move
01:13:52
forward and continue to build on its Legacy so cyan Engen was dead and with it the ramen
01:13:59
Community was the ramen Community dead this beautiful combination of people who
01:14:04
are all bashing together and making something beautiful was this the fall of the Android
01:14:10
ROM it's okay I have the answer maybe
01:14:15
maybe and we'll find out after the
01:14:22
break
01:14:29
welcome back so remember that goodbye blog post called a fork in the road I
01:14:35
read it with a tear in my eye yeah I remember reading it in my college dorm same no I was out of college though it
01:14:41
was a little later no you're right but I might have still been in that dorm it wasn't my college no I was in that apartment for
01:14:46
like two more years he like broke back into it just to remember this the it wasn't the dorm sorry it was my college
01:14:53
apartment my bad uh anyway the the blog post was
01:14:59
called a fork in the road but do you guys trivia question know what it means to Fork
01:15:06
software how much are you willing to wager Andrew this is one oh one okay if
01:15:13
that everything all in I feel I have like a I feel this is going to be embarrassing if we get it wrong because we've been talking about it the entire
01:15:19
episode yeah I don't know I don't want to put too many I I'll do like five I don't know I I have a general concept of
01:15:26
what I think it means but with 53 points you're gonna bet five sorry I'll bet
01:15:32
three I have to write it uh and Andrew said I just wrote Branch off from
01:15:38
correct okay and I drew a branch correct no that's just a y it's a
01:15:43
fork it's a it's like a two if I drew it in the middle it would be too complicated for this analogy so it's a
01:15:50
so yeah a fork in the road a fork music video of see you again no you know what
01:15:57
I'm talking about by who see when I see you again oh that song
01:16:03
you remember the end of the music video no Paul Walker drives down one way oh
01:16:09
yes wait are they really in the music video yeah and they just drive away that's hilarious damn that's Cyanogen
01:16:16
dang wow it's called a fork the block post is called a fork in the road and in software it basically means that you
01:16:22
have one line of sofware and you Fork the software so they this one keeps being developed for this use and this
01:16:28
one starts being developed in this direction and you can eventually end up with very different looking software
01:16:33
that started from the same original base oh I disagree with marquez's model then
01:16:39
his two different directions instead of St that's why Theus three what I drew before did you see what I drew before
01:16:45
mine is Branched off from which is like a branch on a tree which wish I could rewind what I drew before I had a circle
01:16:52
an empty CLE C and then I had a circle with a dot in it to show that it was the same on one side I don't want to derail
01:16:59
anymore so I'll let you keep your points but I think I was more I got it got it so anyway yes um the blog post called a
01:17:06
fork in the road was kind of a little uh a little hint right sanin might have
01:17:12
been dead and they might have been saying goodbye but reading the blog post again you start to look a little deeper
01:17:19
like Da Vinci Code through hyperlink yes says cenon
01:17:25
has served the community well over its eight years it's been our home bringing together friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and
01:17:31
giving it's apt then that on this eve of a holiday we pay our respects we take pride in our hyperlink lineage as we
01:17:39
move forward and continue to build on this Legacy and what happens when you click
01:17:44
the lineage hyperlink boom a fork appears lineage OS thought
01:17:52
you meant like a real actual Fork an image of a fork appears yes so the first
01:17:57
blog post was December 24th 2016 so Christmas EU and uh it was that was our
01:18:04
that was our blog post saying this is us like it's the same people this is some of the coure team behind lineage OS uh
01:18:09
you'll probably learn more about them in a sec but effectively what happened is a number of people who had been working on
01:18:15
cyanin mod and cyanine Inc we're like we're not going to just let this die
01:18:20
right sanen mod was an open source thing it's very different from when like a company goes under and all the IP that
01:18:27
they had just gets destroyed sanen the name sanen mod the name Sage and Os the name was owned by Venture Capital but
01:18:35
the actual code wasn't so all of the code even developed inside of the like
01:18:40
offices under the official Corporation still was open the stuff that wasn't
01:18:45
open source so they were developing stuff that were closed source for sage and Os okay and then they were
01:18:51
developing open source stuff for s yeah and so yeah they just tookan mod
01:18:58
and they basically forked it changed the name of all in all the code from
01:19:03
Cyanogen to lineage OS right this is the launch of lineage
01:19:08
OS so they put out this blog post it says you've probably read the news articles today if you haven't please see
01:19:14
the following yes this is us lenia will be a contrib a continuation of what
01:19:20
sanage and mod was to quote Andy Rubin this is the definition of open a company
01:19:25
pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die and I find that very
01:19:33
beautiful yeah so capitalism and Venture Capital might have destroyed Canan
01:19:39
engine the company but cyanos lives on this actually reminds me of a lot of like what happened with
01:19:46
boosted yeah like if if you guys haven't heard uh the boosted boards episode it's Audio Only but basically the same thing
01:19:53
they got a bunch of venture capital didn't couldn't make enough money and then they fell apart and then they got
01:19:58
sold for parts a word to the wise a million other companies have fallen victim to this yes yes yes yes yes yes
01:20:05
but of course that was not open- sourced right if it's like if it was an open sourced skateboard then somebody else
01:20:10
could take the build the open source build of the electric skateboard and make a new company based on it um but
01:20:16
all that IP just got sold to lime and all that stuff the sign engine project just needed to be borne into something
01:20:22
else so the codebase was all public domain but the brand could just be restarted by anybody um I seem to remember this being
01:20:29
a time when I started to kind of forget about roming though you know this was
01:20:35
the end of 2016 December 2016 and if you guys remember um the
01:20:41
Nexus phones used to be these like awesome incredible developer focused devices that Google also sold to regular
01:20:48
people you know it was like they had a different manufacturer make all these devices
01:20:53
I can name every single one right now just in case you're thinking about that being trivia question no okay um but wa
01:21:00
wait I'm curious name them all oh you like NEX phones name every single one HTC Nexus one then we got Samsung Galaxy
01:21:09
Nexus then we got LG Nexus 4 so good then we got that's the Nexus
01:21:16
5 he loses Shamu Hui Nexus 6p Nexus 6p but also
01:21:23
Nexus 7 tablet came out as well that was also that was way earlier though oh sorry I'm just going in number order
01:21:29
well Nexus 7 was called 7 because of the size not of the number yeah and that was made by Nex 7 LG is LG no Nexus 7 yeah
01:21:40
Asus oh right I had one yeah and then the Nexus 10 was
01:21:45
Samsung yeah they skipped so many numbers well those those correlated with the size of the screen that was a 7 in t
01:21:52
and a 10in tablet yeah so where's the Nexus 3 yeah there was there was no Nexus 3 that's what I'm saying that's true that's true that's true yeah the
01:22:00
the 5x came out the 6p and the 5x came out at the same time with Huawei being the manufacturer of the 6p and the 5x
01:22:06
was LG yeah at the same time anyway I prefer the 6p a the 6p was the last Nexus phone but um S engine died in
01:22:14
December of 2016 what was launched in October of
01:22:21
2016 h Marquez you have 56 Andrew you have two what would you like to wager
01:22:26
anything that was launched um notice that we just talked a lot about Nexus devices 29 Points we
01:22:33
just talked a lot about Nexus devices and I remember I was saying that
01:22:40
was kind of around the time that I started forgetting about roming and I wasn't as interested in like flashing
01:22:45
ROMs on my phone constantly and it was still true that like a lot of features kept getting brought from RS those ROMs
01:22:52
into like new versions of Android yeah yeah happen over and over why why was I
01:22:58
forgetting about roming like we were doing they had Nexus devices and like what happened in October of 2016 first
01:23:03
one they locked the bootload Andrew how many points are you willing to win none none not even going
01:23:11
to guess is this the first one they locked the boot loader no oh okay well I wrote
01:23:17
pixel one that's true correct correct yeah pixel one did it take to like pixel 3 to theot um actually don't know they
01:23:24
might have locked in pixel one no all right yeah but it was kind of this it was kind of like this interesting timing
01:23:30
where sanen the company goes under sanen mod has to change everyone's kind of
01:23:36
losing interest in roming because and then the pixel comes out right this was kind of like the pixel was a little bit
01:23:45
less open than all of the other Nexus devices that were made for developers like it was still easy to ROM um Google
01:23:52
was still committing to Android getting really good uh but they were committing more to Android getting really good than
01:23:58
before they wanted to make the Android iPhone right they realized we we can
01:24:04
actually do this we want to make a device that can become the Bastion of what Android could possibly become um and so it been become a it had
01:24:13
been a while since Android wasn't very good and over those eight years since the first Android phone Google had
01:24:18
really built it out but I think Android was also just more of kind of an open book at that point you know stuff was
01:24:25
changing a lot device there were more devices that you could actually flash ROMs on now that you know there were now
01:24:30
more manufacturers had them locked down um and Android just became a more mature operating system over time right yep uh
01:24:39
and it just back when it was less mature it was a lot more fun and interesting to ROM to kind of mess around with flashing
01:24:44
ROMs because there was kind of more stuff to do there were a lot of features that you could add um different
01:24:50
manufacturers operating systems were not very good it was just like it was in your best interest to be
01:24:56
roming so this kind of left me wondering like okay so if Android was good now
01:25:02
like what's the point in something like lineage OS like are there any people still were there any people still roming
01:25:09
like it seemed like it was it's cool that you picked up the the pieces of sand and mod yeah but there's got to be
01:25:14
way less people actually using it right it's got to be way less um but what I
01:25:21
was told by the lineage people actually really surprised me um you would assume
01:25:27
that the community had kind of died and they were barely holding on but how many
01:25:33
devices are currently running lineage OS a 500,000 B 1.5 million c 3 million and D
01:25:44
5 million all in all in
01:25:50
Marquez do it I'm going nine nine points oh my
01:25:56
goodness I'm betting nine points and Andrew car the one do you have any
01:26:01
points Ander you have one he's got I have two two okay flip him and read they both put D um no 1.5 million
01:26:11
is the answer but we optimistic but 1.5 million is still a lot and I think that there
01:26:17
was a lot of people talking about raming back in the day because phones were so bad because they didn't have as many
01:26:23
features they needed to run faster needed to add things to it and people were just like more willing to be
01:26:29
experimental with their devices because they were so bad whereas now it's like
01:26:34
most of the stuff the phones do very well you know you have to go through
01:26:39
like quite a lot of effort to ROM your phone if and are you going to get that much out of what you going to get out of it yeah it's not going to double the
01:26:46
speed it's not going to make the camera significantly better and there's like a lot of things you you can do as well you
01:26:51
can Sid load things you don't really need to flash a whole R yeah it feels like modifying a car when stock cars are
01:26:57
so good and you're like you're you're decreasing your reliability yeah at the
01:27:03
cost at the like benefit of not that much extra stuff yeah yeah so the people
01:27:08
that are flashing ROMs has probably gone down quite a bit um sanen mod as they say had a much younger more excited user
01:27:16
base that was like flashing those nightly and just talking about it a lot whereas now if you think about it
01:27:22
kind of everything is a computer right like those uh those terminals at like McDonald's that order your food run on
01:27:30
Android what is a computer the quest 3 runs on Android yeah the switch parts of
01:27:35
the switch run on Android start 2 yeah the poar 2 has Android automotive yeah
01:27:41
all of this different stuff like all of these things run on and AOSP which is Android open source project so like you
01:27:48
know if you could just take something that was a better version of and Android say lineage Jo that had been like
01:27:54
significantly updated and had like newer Android features and just it's open open
01:27:59
source you could put it on your device wouldn't you do that instead of using AOSP I kind of want to know how many of
01:28:05
the one and a half million lineage OS devices are not smartphones are there like refrigerators running lineage in
01:28:12
like people's basements probably that's awesome yeah I don't think anyone has any companies have really come out and said we are using lineage Jo as our like
01:28:20
basil stuff most them like you know you don't need the latest Google camera app
01:28:25
like Michelle told us that his printer runs Android it's got like yeah it's running like Android 8
01:28:32
but you don't need like a camera and all this like latest stuff yeah um so yeah well there there are still a lot of
01:28:38
community members that are maintaining lineage for individual devices like if you go on the lineage website most
01:28:43
popular phones on there are on there and it sort of works the same way as it worked on Cyanogen mod where you buy a
01:28:50
new phone you decide you want it to be the guy that maintains it you go on and you maintain it and it's kind of fun but
01:28:55
it's being used a lot in IND like in Industry now okay which is very different so I'm trying to figure out
01:29:01
okay well what really happened to the the modding Community right like people
01:29:07
stopped using this is it just because uh Android got mature and things got good
01:29:12
right now you might have heard of this kind of conspiracy theory that's been going around for a while that Google has
01:29:20
been taking things from AOS p and instead of updating AOSP they just update them in the Google apps right and
01:29:27
this is sort of a major thing that has been happening for quite a few years now so yes Android is open sourced and if
01:29:34
you want to use Android you can use it but it's like the camera app's going to be from like Android 8 and this app's
01:29:41
going to be from Android 8 I made a video about this yeah yeah and they started just like using their own um
01:29:47
stuff in like they have PX like pixel X now and the messenger client and AOSP is
01:29:52
different from Google messages and like everything is like Google this Google that versus the AOSP versions so there's
01:29:58
kind of this conspiracy theory that Google intentionally they need to make money off of Android right they originally
01:30:05
made it open source because they needed to get as much of a user base as possible but then at one point they were
01:30:10
like how do we monetize this we can't keep giving away all the good stuff that we're making for free this this like the
01:30:16
fourth time this has been brought up like somebody's like we got to be I got to make some money off
01:30:21
[Laughter] I really want to I really want to do it yeah so I asked a lot of people right I
01:30:28
asked michall I asked the lineage guys like I was kind of like trying to ask them like do you think this is the main reason that raming has like gotten so
01:30:36
not popular you know that Google's like taking AOSP and making it a lot harder to like build stuff off of and they
01:30:43
actually think that it makes a lot of sense for Google to be doing this uh because the biggest reason that they say
01:30:50
is that our phones are now a much more major part of the way that we live our lives right and back in the day you
01:30:57
could ROM your phone you could do whatever you wanted and like you would still go to your bank maybe and there
01:31:03
would be a banking app but the banking app was really bad it was very new and as our phones kind of get more mature
01:31:09
and have become a more integral part of our lives there have been people at those banking companies are like whoa
01:31:15
whoa whoa whoa whoa this person is throwing an OS that we have no idea what it is and the security features we have
01:31:21
no idea what it is and they're using our banking app on some phone and so a big
01:31:26
reason that both the lineage OS people and people like Michelle think that roming is like getting a lot harder and
01:31:33
people are not doing it as much is because now Google has made it that if you use a custom ROM on your phone
01:31:40
things like banking apps don't work right and imagine your banking app doesn't work like that's a major reason
01:31:47
not to ROM your phone you can't use a lot of the core features that you would want to use on your device yeah it's not
01:31:54
worth it anymore it's not worth it anymore cuz like what are you going to do you're going to get like you're going to like unlock your Snapdragon processor
01:32:01
and get faster performance like what does that even mean d but I'll have my
01:32:06
flashlight but like early on when we're talking about like roming phones and doing it all the time and resetting it
01:32:12
and like just so little of your life was on it back then like it was a a device
01:32:18
that accessory your phone is everything about you at this point there are so many insanely important things and if
01:32:24
something were to mess up on your phone you could be really screwed for a while
01:32:30
so like it's way scarier to also just like do things to your totally yeah yeah yeah so security is like very important
01:32:37
you know there's security patches and Bug fixes all the time just all the time as like it's a it's a rat race as soon
01:32:43
as there gets there's this bug that people find out about they got to patch it and then people exploit it and Patch it and exploit it it's the whole thing
01:32:50
um random trivia question there is a fast food app that
01:32:57
does not work if you mod your phone which one which one all my fast food app
01:33:03
oh God you're you're wagering all of your zero points I don't know why I feel like I I have zero points I thought you
01:33:09
had two and then he wagered them all last time we'll give you a credit of 50 100
01:33:16
points 50 points 50 point I get 50 because Marquez won't more than 10
01:33:22
points what marz at 76 I've got a bunch wrong okay I wager 50 points there's
01:33:27
a the only thing Andrew is this confident about his Taco Bell but I don't want to say Taco Bell that's it's
01:33:33
a little bit concerning that's the nicest thing you've ever said about remember that there remember that
01:33:39
there's a prize don't you want to win the prize oh Fair wow he got a that's interesting well I'm going to write a
01:33:46
fast food app and I don't think I'm right but what are you wagering oh you said I had what 7
01:33:54
76 six six six points wow imagine only wagering six points Andrew could
01:34:01
potentially end up owing me 50 points what if he get that mean you what's the
01:34:08
question again just so I know there is a fast food app that does not work if you mod your phone if you unlock your
01:34:14
bootloader what is that fast food app that's a good
01:34:20
one I don't know all right oh I saw you right I wrote
01:34:28
Wendy's no oh I wrote Starbucks no the
01:34:34
answer is McDonald's oo yeah Michelle says he doesn't really know why this is
01:34:39
the case I don't know I'm so sad that I got that wrong I have a
01:34:45
guess it probably has to do with the money thing right yeah it has to do with gpay like I I have there's is that what they call it now is that what the kids
01:34:51
call it Google Wallet Google Wallet no wallet pay Gchat Google G Google pay
01:34:59
Google Hollow yeah it probably does like a check and if there's anything wrong with the O it's not it's just funny that
01:35:04
it's that's only McDonald's that does that uh that was the one that michall pointed out in particular yeah it could
01:35:10
be other on Starbucks does a lot of the same stuff well Starbucks is a bank that's what I was gonna say when you
01:35:15
wrote that and how many Starbucks gift cards yeah that made a lot that's how Starbucks makes all their money is by investing your money that you add to
01:35:22
your card on the app it's yes they're literally a bank yeah that's why it's
01:35:28
called Starbucks wow anyway yeah anyway minus
01:35:34
70 points yeah that felt horrible to say out loud yeah so yeah security is just
01:35:40
becoming really important because our devices are kind of like this One-Stop shop they really are pdas now and so as
01:35:47
security gets more important all of these apps are like I don't want this unknown like OS to be running my app
01:35:54
especially when it has things like your financial details on it because if they get in trouble they're going to get in a lot of trouble risky yeah so it's
01:36:01
getting more closed down and surprisingly people like the lineage Jo team and michall are like yeah that
01:36:06
makes sense we actually totally understand that right so it's not as much of the like Google is intentionally
01:36:12
trying to make Android harder to use they really think that the reason is because of security I'm sure they're
01:36:17
also like they don't want to be the one to create something and then that winds up being the reason somebody loses a lot
01:36:24
and then they have to think like that's kind of our fault like not not even legally but just like that sucks to
01:36:30
think like we did something that a bunch of people lost important things yeah but it is a bummer cuz like even RCS does
01:36:38
not work in AOSP oh yeah yeah that like the messaging client of AOSP doesn't
01:36:44
have RCS support that's funny you have to use Google messages which is crazy but you know the spirit of roming is not
01:36:51
dead um there's plenty of Open Source material that's being published consistently um people like Stephanie
01:36:57
are a huge open source like people they like really advocate for it and I think
01:37:02
that even if these ROMs like lineage os are not the level of sanen mod like they
01:37:09
used to be where the community was like there were so many people and everyone was super excited about all the time and
01:37:14
flashing every single day I think every Community will always have enough people that want to maintain it and just for
01:37:20
the reason they want to maintain it right they're not they don't have to make a company out of everything and
01:37:25
that's kind of the magic of Open Source you don't have to make a company out of this got to make money out of this got
01:37:32
to make money out of this I just remember yeah the modding days were fun I had my and I still have it the
01:37:38
original Motorola Droid that I had that phone I can't believe it still boots
01:37:43
that phone went through it and that my Galaxy Nexus I had custom roms I was
01:37:48
overclocking those phones I had custom some kernels where you could choose like all right let me get up to 1100 MHz when
01:37:54
the screen is on but then underclock down to 200 MHz when the screen is off and have this refresh rate so that I can
01:38:01
like cycle between those clock speeds quickly and end up with a faster phone with longer battery life with all these
01:38:07
custom kernels it was insane these phones were cooking in my pockets try it was it's unreal and I was flashing
01:38:13
nightly I was I was do all that I was that was that was quite a time yeah yeah when was the last time you tried to ROM
01:38:18
a phone I I think right around the time that santen was done like I remember being on the nightly I remember doing a
01:38:25
lot of Paranoid Android and like cuz that was like an ALT ROM right around when Canen was super yeah it was like
01:38:32
Canen was the big one not a mom but there was like Paranoid andreid on the side which is like oh this got these
01:38:38
cool themes and the couple extra kernel features for my like overclocking desires I definitely wasn't doing it
01:38:43
much after like 2015 2016 I did it once on my ays nice that's all I remember
01:38:49
nice shout out to the Aris man just think it's like pretty incredible how important cage and mod ended up being to
01:38:55
like a lot of stuff that happened you know like OnePlus only really exists the way it does because of sage mod yeah I
01:39:02
mean it was a community based thing that was also built off a different person that built something and then made it to
01:39:08
like it's literally in the history of Android at this point and like Android phones in general so that's wild yeah so
01:39:14
while we might not do a lot of roming ourselves anymore I think it's beautiful that communities will still come
01:39:19
together and make open source projects that are really cool you want to do one more trivia to uh can I get 50 more
01:39:25
points sure I wager everything all right can I get how many points do you have no I'll take 50 points that works I think I
01:39:31
have I think that's okay Marquez has 70 points all right what famous piece of
01:39:37
Science Fiction media does the name Nexus of the Google phones come from we've definitely talked
01:39:44
about this before I have no idea second you said famous media I was
01:39:50
I was cooked I'll give you a hint this famous piece of sci-fi media has Androids in it star
01:39:58
something let's go with TR Androids these Androids may or may
01:40:04
not be asleep sometimes and while they are asleep they might be doing something
01:40:10
all right what' you guys get I wrote The Bachelor is this is it I going to feel
01:40:18
horrible did you put Starbucks again I'll give you a the book and the movie have different names and I'll accept
01:40:24
either Android's Dream of Electric Sheep and um do Android stream like to cheve is
01:40:30
this wrong he put Star Wars that is unfortunately wrong David is right and the movie is um Blade Runner yes
01:40:38
yeah famous media the in fact he wagered all his points Marquez wagered all his
01:40:45
points and he had 70 points so now he has zero Andrew had netive 50 and
01:40:50
wagered 50 I did not 100 um the one the Android from uh Blade
01:40:59
Runner the model is the Nexus 6 what oh wow and and the estate of Philip K dick
01:41:05
sued Google over it that's really funny yeah dang the prize for the winner is a
01:41:12
lovely 3D printed crown that Tim is handing oh look at this you may hand it to Marquez cuz he won with zero
01:41:19
points over my headphones Tim is placing the crown on MAR beautiful nice little Tiara
01:41:26
all right sucks little uh little spin I think on this Crown I think the winner
01:41:33
of every trivia moving forward gets this Crown so just gets past around this Crown yeah yeah I'll write my name on it
01:41:39
and then every sub winner should also do the same there we go okay but uh it was fun kind of like recapping on what
01:41:46
happened from the birth of Android up until now and how important the open source Community was to all of that I
01:41:52
mean as someone who wasn't part of that community and did very little knew just enough about it to know what Cyanogen
01:41:58
MOD was and then to know about it as in like inside of OnePlus and stuff it's
01:42:04
fun to learn it was a crazy set of years dude sounds like something I would have been into and I was flashing signage and
01:42:10
mod nightly every single day wiping my device every single day I would lose all
01:42:16
of my data all of my photos every single day for no reason because I was a
01:42:23
nerd same that's you and me both simpler times simpler times but it was a good
01:42:30
ERA of Android yeah zero points thought about it um and we'll catch you guys in
01:42:36
the next one remember there's a reg regularly scheduled episode for Friday so don't worry about that see you later
01:42:43
peace wa for is produced by Adam Alan Ellis roben we are partner with the Box media podcast Network and our intro
01:42:48
outro music is by V Sil
01:43:06
a
