It’s us again, and we though we’d share a little update on our plans, progress, and what’s been going on at Androidacy HQ. We’ve been hard at work crafting our next-gen API, updating our modules, adding new modules into our repo, and adding new fonts to font manager. We’ve also been optimizing our website from front to back and to front again. And we’ve been getting back in touch with our community.
Let’s dive on in.
Community efforts
Our team has seen quite the turmoil – with us kicking out a project lead, several new moderators, and more. While we cannot share the exact circumstances surrounding much of that for privacy reasons, let’s just say it’s been a heck of a time. That being said, myself, and everyone else on the team, feels that we’ve came out of it stronger. But some of our community feels that we’ve lost touch with them – and we want to fix that.
With us being busy working on our new next-gen website and API (more on those later), unfortunately we’ve had to leave much of our community efforts to our volunteer moderators and bots. While they’ve done a good job, that left us without much of a pulse on our community – leading to some bitterness and unfortunately, that one guy who’s submitted every form on our site at least five times to complain (I, for one, envy having that much free time 😜). While some of our community has a certain way with words (our poor website manager has learned quite a few new swear words), others have made their concerns more clear. I’d like to take a moment to address some concerns.
The Big One: Ads
People hate ads. It’s no secret. As much as 60% of our own users use an adblocker. And guess what? Yours truly has one active right now!
But as they say, nothing is free. That includes our infrastructure which includes servers in several countries, our bandwidth costs, our security solutions, our server software even. For legal reasons, our lawyers advise us not to share exact numbers, but our infrastructure costs are as high has five digit numbers some years. That’s a lot, and none of us are millionaires or have venture fund backing. That’s where ads come in – they cover over 80% of our costs to operate, with Patreon subscriptions and other revenue sources making up the rest.
Here’s the thing though: we make no profit. None. Not a dime. Except maybe that dusty one I dropped under the desk.
Why? Because we don’t want to do it that way. That’s not what we’re here for. This isn’t our day job (yes – we have real life jobs too!) and this isn’t our business. We do it for our community. Anything that we make above our cost to operate is given back to the community – through our sponsorships, our Module Repository Revenue Share program, and occasionally, to plant some trees.
So yes, we understand, ads are annoying. But they are a necessary evil, and we’d appreciate – but not require – if you kept that adblockers off for us. And for now, they’re staying right where they are.
The next big one: copying others work
Some in our community feel our Modules Repo is kanging – a term in the Android community meaning copying without credit and claiming as our own. This is patently false.
We do host a handful of our own modules – and there we proudly put our name on them. But nowhere on third party modules do we claim them as our own – in fact, we go out of our way to not do that, because it’s not right and we value our developers more than anything else.
Other’s modules do display ads – but, once again, that is to cover the costs of hosting them and providing the enhanced functionality such as reviews, automatic virus scanning, advanced analytics, and (soon) tight integration with the very same APIs we use in our own modules. We also offer developers the opportunity, should they wish to take advantage and meet the minimum traffic requirements, to take a cut of the profit – meaning the existing work they do can make them money, with no extra strings attached. In addition, we provide an opportunity for developers to cover hosting costs themselves and remove ads for their users on their module pages.
Other outreach efforts
We also get complaints we’re not present enough in the community, and this one has a grain of truth to it. That’s why we’re hiring more developers and recruiting more moderators – to ensure bugs get fixed fast and users get support even faster.
The fastest way to reach us is via Telegram or Reddit. We’re also working on a Twitter presence.
If you have any feedback – please fill out our 2022 Community Survey. It would mean a lot to us!
Other Updates
We’ve been saying it for awhile now, and now it’s almost here – version 7 of the API is currently in staging being tested with a limited number of users. This release halves the response times for most API calls, adds enhanced functionality to our downloads center, and more.
API V7 will also bring benefits to our module developers – allowing them to take advantage of the same APIs we do for integrity verification, update checking, device and architecture specific files, and more. We can’t wait to share it with you!
We also have been working on stripping the fat on our website – that means less popups, less JavaScript, and more time for you to do what you need. A dark mode should be shipping soon, so keep an eye out for that!
An in house subscription is coming soon. Patreon is giving us too many issues, and those issues are the direct cause of the ad-free sometimes not working on our website. We invite everyone affected by those bugs to contact us directly to sort things out. When we release the new subscription model, discount codes will be offered to our existing Patrons to ease the transition.
That’s all for now. Got any questions? Don’t be afraid to hit us up! And we hope to have more news by the end of July.