Friday, December 10, 2010

Acer Liquid: The Story



Today you could read on my Twitter that I sold my Liquid. It was my first Android-based device, but I'm going to stick to this operating system, because I find it the one with the biggest future on the market.

I bought my Liquid around 11 months ago, for quite good price. My first idea was to buy Acer S200 (WM device) also with Snapdragon, but I gave Android a try, which was a very wise decission.

Soon after the arrival of the device I wanted to customize and improve it, as I did with my previous device, Toshiba Portege G900 - I cooked ROM's for it. The community itself wasn't very big those days, but thank's to Paul O'Brien soon new active members appeared.

I rooted my device and installed Lickonn recovery, but that wasn't enough. Paul released MCR for Liquid - ROM which I used quite long.
Few weeks later, two known members of Android community offered their support to improve this device, and they suggested to donate them, so they could get devices in their hands and start to hack it - release AOSP ROM, build custom kernel, port Sense, an more. So they recieved the donations, bought brand new Liquid's and began their attempts to improve them.

After sending petition from users, Acer decided to release Liquid's kernel source, but it was incompleate, so it needed much work to get working kernel in the result. The first who released stable, tweaked kernel was disc0, his work was really appreciated by the community.

Than new person appeared on the Liquid dev scene, very controversial guy, who did much for Liquid owners - Angio. He was the first to provide leaked 2.1 Eclair ROM's from Acer. He also released custom, modded version, called ACR. After few releases, he got contact with the two devs who got their Liquid's from users donations, and created new project, called Liquid Community ROM (LCR).
Few weeks later Angio was talking about new 2.1 build which he got from his source, made everyone waiting for it, but in the end he didn't release anything, causing very big flame-war in Liquid's forum.

But after first releases of 2.1 leaks we realised, that the old Lickonn recovery is not working anymore. So that new person with dev skills appeared - malez. He made the old recovery compatible with Eclair, than tweaked and improved it, and it's still the best recovery available for Liquid, it evolved very much from it's early form, offering much more tweaks.

After Angio's escape from Liquid's world, the LCR developers still continued their work. They've made many attempts on building AOSP, but without result, once they even got their devices bricked (which was unusuall), but thanks to their in-Acer friends they got them up again. They invited malez to join the LCR team.

I realised that LCR ROM's are not enough complete for me, so I made my first attempts on customizing ROM's, mostly with WinRar as my main developement tool (:D), using LCR as a base and sample, and I released Liberated ROM series. I got aquainted with the structure of the ROM and .apk files, began to understand how does it all work. Few weeks later malez contacted me, and after discussion, he invited me to join LCR team. I was really happy to cooperate in this team, and it started the new chapter in my Android modding story.

Few weeks later new people started to being active in the community - Vache and Xian. They both created own versions of modded ROM's, Vache created also port of Acer Stream ROM, which soon was named as LCR-S, after me and malez asked Vache to join us and help to provide the best ROM for Liquid users. Two devs who got their Liquids from donations sold them and bought other devices. In the meantime many LCR ROM's were released.

When Acer released officiall Eclair update, together with kernel source, we were still not having any AOSP ROM, nor Sense port. But than came phh and solved this problem, by building custom kernel which opened new doors for ROM developers. Soon after we saw first ports of non-Acer ROM's, FRF91 and more.
Koudelka released vendor tree for Liquid, together with AOSP ROM, he contacted with Xian and started working on CM support for our device. Later we saw MIUI, stable CM and Sense ports.

Today there are still many people working hard on Liquid ROM's, the developement for this device is still alive and active.

Sorry for missing some important facts, and making the whole story so short, but I wanted to include only the most important facts.

Live long the Liquid ;)

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting story. Thank You.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yap.. very interesting and touching.. story... anyway thank you for sharing and good effort.

    ReplyDelete