XDA rant

No longer updated

Introduction

XDA-developers - the oldest, yet the greatest bastion of Android development.

Why it's fine to use XDA-developers

Basically one of the few select central forums for Android devs

For most developers, XDA is generally the de facto place to share their work.

Why XDA-developers should be avoided

Bloated with corpo shit

In short, both the site & the forum is behind CloudFlare, Huawei ads may be embedded on its 1st-party scripts (especially common everytime there's a Huawei event), & account registration demands Goolag's ReCaptcha.

Speaking of Huawei, XDA always covers their shit, when they shouldn't be, since Huawei PDAs are no longer XDA-friendly.

Did I also mention promotions? Now I did. On the XDA's website, they'll occasionally run "sponsored content" on the top-most section, which is usual action for corpo-ridden guys, but questionable for a "made by developers, for developers" site IMO.

11/12/2020 Update : With the new forum redesign, surely XDA's even "better" with their Huawei devotion. Now the ad's inbuilt, & can't be disabled even if 1st-party JavaScript is disabled. In addition, on the top-left section, below the big XDA logo, XDA has linked their "dedicated" Huawei | XDA "site", which covers Huawei stuff.

15/3/2021 Update : The latest XDA-Xenforo update caused the entire forum to reject anyone visiting from the browser without enabled JS & XHR. This behavior is present in Chromium-based PC browsers - Pale Moon's JS engine is shit enough that both JS & XHR disabled won't cause this issue (for now).

Alternatives

As of this moment, unfortunately, there's not many alternatives, and, for each alternatives, each has their flaws.

Telegram

Since more development is at Telegram instead of XDA (and whoever's developing at XDA will most likely have a Telegram channel), this is one of the most popular alternatives to XDA. However, it's still not ideal, since Telegram's a mobile-first platform.

Benefits:

• You could access it anywhere as long as your phone is connected to the internet, I suppose?

Flaws:

• The inherent flaws of Telegram's mobile client / account requirements : Phone number is mandatory. This denies access to anyone who doesn't use Telegram, which matters especially if they need some information from any discussion channels.
You could also use virtual phone number to bypass the requirements, but you'll be more likely to lose your account in the likely case of not backing up.


• Accessing the discussion channel requires the Telegram mobile client, which also means that you need a Telegram account (& the aforementioned phone number). At least the updates channels can be accessed in any browser (most of the time, there's a tiny "preview channel" on the bottom).
• The discussion channels' activity & discussion quality varies. They're also commonly bloated with noobs being spoonfed & not digging for what they ask.
• Unclear management of device update channel : Who handles them? XDA, the devices' makers, or someone else?
A good example of this would be the Pocophone F1 update channel. It is assumed to be made & maintained by Xiaomi / Poco, since it has Poco-related ads.

Twitter

<sarcasm>Twitter - the social media known for its harmonious, peaceful, & happy environment. The media that blocks evil content & praises heroes of justice.</sarcasm>

Sarcasm aside, Twitter is OK for status updates, but that's it. All they will offer is status updates, complete with a comment section that's either not used or potentially loaded with "plz update" requests (read : demands).

Directly using the official site

On paper, this seems like the easiest route, especially for established ROMs such as Lineage, Carbon, & OMNI. However, for the most part, this is basically the expert mode, as these sites will expect the users to understand what they're doing by not providing guides for the most part (except for Lineage, who provides a complete wiki) - which is definitely a good thing.

However, some of these sites like their soydev stuff (JS, XHR, frame) & may not load / work properly without them enabled.

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