Meet the new owner of Oxygen Updater

Adhiraj Singh Chauhan will lead the project with a team of devs
Test Admin

[EDIT]: written by Adhiraj.

This article was originally written by Auston LeRoy, who was supposed to be the new Team Lead. However, circumstances changed, and Auston stepped down from the position. Adhiraj took over as Tech Lead, and Team Lead shortly after. Read more about this in this news article. We have edited this article to better reflect the current team, and as such, have removed personal information of people who're no longer part of the team.

Instead of making another news article announcing the new leadership, we decided to edit this article itself, as it doesn't impact the user negatively at all. As you've seen in this article, we outlined our progress after the hand-over, and the app saw tremendous growth. We're on target to cross a million downloads by August 2020.

I'd like to give updates on a few things mentioned in this article, that are either redundant, or no longer true/required:

Server Migrations:

Obviously, we've already migrated our servers to newer, more powerful ones. User feedback on this was very positive - everyone noticed reduced response times and thus, faster load times in the app.

Android app:

14th August 2019 marked the first release of the app (v3.0.0) under new leadership, which came with new features like a much-loved dark mode and a much-needed complete redesign of the Settings screen. We've been pumping out updates almost every 2 weeks since then, including translation updates (immense gratitude to our translators for those). The Kotlin rebuild is, as of writing this edit, still underway, but it's mostly feature-complete. We've gone ahead and redesigned the app from scratch, and I'm sure you'll love it. As always, you can email us at [email protected] for feedback/suggestions.

Donations:

We chose to go for Patreon donations for now. You can find this link in our GitHub organisation (at the top), and we'll be adding it to the app in a future release.

In the original article, we didn't mention the fact that there were two members of the team that were part of the original team with Arjan - AnonymousWP and OneNormalUsername.

On a broad perspective, their responsibilities include administration, management. They also add update-data to the app via our admin portal (by the way: you can also help us out in this, just email us!), reply to emails, Play Store reviews, etc. Per their request, we're not providing any personal information. However, here are their email addresses, in order:

[email protected]

[email protected]


Anyway, here is the original article, edited for formatting, as well as removing personal information of people who're no longer part of the team (to protect their identity):

Greetings,

My name is Auston LeRoy, part of the team taking over the Oxygen Updater application as Arjan takes a more active role in the real world. As some of you may know, Arjan, the developer behind the open source application, announced that he will know longer be able to support the project from November 2019, onwards. It would be a shame to let the project die, since it is used & beloved by so many folks in the community.

My first instinct was to reach out and see how I could help, and within an hour, a small group of us was formed. All with varying levels of technical experience, divided by borders, united by purpose: to keep a necessary piece of software alive. As of late, it seems like a going trend to end-of-life projects, which were beloved by the community, when their passionate creator can no longer support it.

We are also a bunch of nerds, we like to learn new things, tinker on new ideas, as most of you do, so let's tinker together.

Future Plans:

After getting up to speed with the current state of the platform, I was thoroughly impressed with the simplicity of the consumer-facing app, while having a robust set of content-management tools on the back end, to support the admins. Over the next few months, the transition team will be working in parallel with Arjan, to get up to speed on the platform.

The back-end team will be working to stand up a new instance of the server, as the current one is at capacity and requires a rebuild. While our Android team, works on a number of initiatives, with our end goal being to re-write the app in Kotlin. First up will be to release a UI redesign, featuring a dark theme. There is some debate within the team whether or not to remove the ads from the platform. However, ads suck, so I want them banished to the shadow realm. We will be looking for user feedback, about the ads, other features, and just your thoughts about the app, so please contact us at [email protected].

By the way, this is also the new email address listed in the Play Store where users can request support for the app.

Why?

Personally, I am doing this for a couple of reasons, the first is because I use the app myself. I have owned a smartphone since 2007 when I got the Motorola Q9m, followed by the Droid in '09. Being stuck on Verizon Wireless, updates to the platformed were released at a snail's pace. As the years went on, I would watch for months as my friends got features that I had to wait for. Sure there are alternatives to download those updates, but it's 2019 after all and upgrading should require me to be at my PC. As we move into an era where you may be able to replace your PC entirely, it is becoming ever more important to have apps like the Oxygen Updater, out there, trusted, secure, and free for all.

The Team

Besides me, the team consists of various other people. Below, you’ll find a short bio of our team members:

Adhiraj Singh Chauhan, 23, from India, has been coding since 6th grade. Began his journey into coding with web development, branching out into C/C++, then onto various other languages and frameworks.

Former experience includes full-stack developer at BlackRock. Currently he's working at a startup, building his own, and freelancing on the side.

Programming languages known: C/C++, HTML/CSS/JS, Java/Kotlin, PHP, SQL, C#, BASIC, Haskell, Python, Lua, Bash/Batch

Technologies used: Android, Angular, Vue, React, NodeJS/Express/Pug/EJS, Apache Ignite, Cassandra, Solr, Spring

Why I did this project: "I've been with OnePlus since the OnePlus 5, and with Oxygen Updater a day after I bought that device. This is me giving back to the community, and learning from the experience"

Contact: [email protected]

Larson Carter, from the USA, has been coding in various languages for 4+ years with networking/automation experience, he functions as a full stack developer, contracting his talents to local businesses. In addition to helping local schools with their infrastructure.

Programming languages: Java/Kotlin, C/C++, Python3, Bash/Bash-Scripting, Swift 4+, Powershell, HTML, CSS, JS

Technologies: Java Swing, WordPress, Linux Administration, Google Firebase, .NET, MySQL, REST APIS

Why I did this project: "I wanted to do this project strictly for the community. Also I am doing it for the experience of learning on a greater scale. I've also been using this app since I got my OP3T!"

Contact: [email protected]

Henry López del Pino, currently studying Computer and Telecommunications Engineering at Diego Portales University, Chile. Experience (8 years) in Linux Servers (CentOS/RHEL, Debian-based) for web hosting (Nginx, Apache, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB), mail hosting (Postfix, Dovecot, Courier), VMs (OpenVZ, LXC, KVM) and streaming. Also currently working on some Telecommunications and Networking projects for events, transportation, ISP and mobile carriers.

How can you help?

  • Translators: As the app grows our global footprint, we are going to have an ever increasing need for translators. Check out our Discord to get in touch
  • Donators: We will be discussing the idea of creating a PayPal or in-app purchases that users could make to support the project costs. This will need some work on our side, so stay tuned!
  • Developers: The app remains open source and we will keep hosting our public repos on GitHub. You can always send a Pull Request to contribute to the app, its website or public back-end.