YU's android on steroids: All that developers should know

Android on Steroids is a new technology on the block for developers to explore from the house of YU Televentures Pvt Ltd. Unlike other smartphone makers, YU claims to give a pure experience with Android on Steroids, purer than what Stock Android can offer.

This is why the company has launched Project Highway, where it enables seamless integration of all source codes coming to Android, whether they are from Google, component makers or the community. Project Highway is the place for Android developers to be, claims the company.

Developers, who want their kind of features on their smartphones, should be a part of the project, states the companys cofounder Sumeet Arora.

YU Yunicorn, the latest device from the companys stable, runs Android on Steroids, and is the first toy for developers getting their hands dirty on Project Highway.

In an exclusive conversation with TechGig.com, Sumeet explained the nitty-gritty of Project Highway and Android on Steroids and how developers can benefit from these.

Excerpts:

What is project highway all about and how are you involving developers with YU Yunicorn?

When we talk about Android, there are source codes coming in from all over the world. To start off, we have Google that is dropping sources. Then there are component guys who are dropping source codes for device drivers and all. The community people also drop in a lot of code. The basic challenge is to integrate all in a seamless way so that a patch that comes from, lets say Google, should be tagged in there or a quality support from Chipset guys gets in there and streamlines into the devices where the components are used. So project Highway can be conveniently defined as Source Code Supply Chain management system. This is what we are extensively working on and there is an entire ecosystem system for the developers to come and contribute that is built up on our platform.

How many developers are connected with project highway as of now?

We are gaining momentum and it is building up day by day. Along with this, we are also getting in guys in terms of our engagement programmes for developers, which are under works right now. We will soon have a point scoring mechanism and we will have lead guys to get the devices first for them to start working. We will also have some cash/kind reward system for the developers to come and develop with us. Since there is already a huge ecosystem around Android, we would like to get more and more developers coming in on Project Highway.

Is Project highway available for other devices as well or this is just restricted to YU devices?

Yes. As of now, the manifest that we are actually putting in for the repositories that we have created is for YU devices by far. But as we gain momentum, we will keep putting devices every week. So, initially it will be only for YU devices, but over a period of time, we will provision for other devices as well and we will have manifest files to be rolled on to the other devices as well. It will be an open source system going forward.

Can you also comment on Android on Steroids and what are the differences in between Stock Android and Android on Steroids?

Project Highway will get a lot of contribution from the developers who want performance efficiency on the devices that we are bringing. There are a few trade-offs sometimes, in terms of efficiency, features, et al. We need to balance that out. Over a period of time, we will do strict tightening of the features that we see going into Steroids. So Android on Steroids will be a cleaner version of Android that we get in the market today. When we talk of a community OS, we should actually give the choice to the community to add features that they like. This is what Project Highway is all about. But we will be very careful in picking up the features that we want to push in Android on Steroids.

How have you ensured security in Android on Steroids?

There are a lot of patches that Google sends out to ensure the security of Android. We would like to leverage on them and that is why we say that Android on Steroids will be very close to Stock Android. The moment a security threat is sensed in Android, Google releases a patch and we would like to get that integrated in our devices. We are looking at this area very closely. There are security patches available with the community guys as well. We also have an in-house security team that is doing some amount of security patches production.

We also have a code review system in place, where we have community guys coming in and give their piece. We will also have a code review system where we will have a build bot, which will build on every patch that is submitted, see all CTS and identify the gap areas where security patches are needed, so that they can be released as soon as possible.

What was the need for project highway to come in?

There are a whole lot of developers who love us and want to contribute on our devices. To attach them to our projects, I think this is the best way for those guys to come and start working with is. It will not be restricted to just dropping the code and let them use it. We would like to bring in the best to our devices and populate it further. Anyone who wants to get associated with us can go to developer.yuplaygod.com and get started.

Watch the video here to get a glimpse of Android on Steroids:

source: techgig.com