







One year ago, we closed 2016 with the alpha 1.0 release of AsteroidOS. This release brought a lot of media attention to AsteroidOS and grew the community. However, back then, the project was still very young and suffered from all sorts of bugs and limitations.

Since the initial alpha release, we have focused on improving the overall stability and usability of AsteroidOS with the ultimate goal of releasing a stable v1.0. While this major release didn't see the light of day in 2017, a lot of great progress has been made.

After nearly 1800 commits and 20000 IRC messages exchanged (bot excluded), it is now high time to highlight all the hard work that has been achieved by the AsteroidOS community in 2017 and what's remaining for 2018.

What has been done in 2017...

January

Support for sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, compass) on the LG G Watch (more...)

Support for the Fast Charging variant of the Asus Zenwatch 2

Support for the microphone on several watches

February

Support for Low Power Mode Bluetooth on various watches (multiplied battery life by 7 on several watches)

Integration of GitHub hooks to AsteroidBot , our beloved IRC bot

, our beloved IRC bot Brussels Community Meeting - FOSDEM Dinner (more...)

Support for vibrations on notifications

Support for the Samsung Gear Live (more...)

Support for the Asus Zenwatch 1 (more...)

Support for the Asus Zenwatch 3 (more...)

Upgrade to Qt 5.7 and then to Qt 5.8

March

Various internationalization infrastructure improvements

Screenshot Bluetooth Low Energy profile

Handwriting recognition integration

April

Bluetooth Low Energy encryption and authentication

Time synchronization Bluetooth Low Energy profile

Proof of concept of Asteroid app written in Go (more...)

Support for the LG G Watch R (more...)

Presentation at FOSS-North (more...)

Nightlies build server (more...)

May

Notification preferences in AsteroiOSSync

Support for USB MTP

Upgrade to Qt 5.9

June

Radical code base simplification with AsteroidApp

Suppression of the App Switcher

Upgrade to OpenEmbedded pyro

July

New notification center

New website

August

ConnectWatch's crowdfunding announcement (more...)

Today calendar & weather launcher panel

Swipe indicators

London meetup (more...)

September

ConnectWatch's crowdfunding campaign (more...)

Mediatek watches proof of concept

Telephony stack integration

Support for GPS

Support for media playback & sound on notifications

October

Some bugs solved by Hacktoberfest participants (more...)

12/24 time format and Fahrenheit

Upgrade to OpenEmbedded Rocko

Development of a Compass app (more...)

Alarm Clock UX revamp

QEMU support (more...)

November

Major refactoring with lots of new qml-asteroid components

Support for Bluetooth on the Sony Smartwatch 3

Presentation at Capitole du Libre (more...)

QtQuickCompiler integration

Various i18n improvements

December

First run tutorial and configuration

Dynamic locale switching

Presentation at KubeCon (more...)

Notification snoozing

System upgrade documentation (more...)

Upgrade to Qt 5.10

A word on the ConnectWatch

Since a significant part of the work and communication done by the AsteroidOS project in 2017 was related to the announcement of ConnectWatch, it would be unfair not to mention this episode. ConnectWatch was a french company which tried to crowdfund an AsteroidOS watch under the same name during August and September 2017.

The project was only pushed by one person, Arunan Sathasivan, without any tech, funding or marketing experience. From the very begining of the collaboration, huge communication issues were made apparent on the side of ConnectWatch. Hence, the AsteroidOS project took great care to distinguish the announcements made by this company from the work done by the community.

Despite those precautions, the watch project managed to mobilize enough members of our community to reach a total funding of 16000€. We greatly appreciate this interest and are very grateful for the support shown by those who believed in an AsteroidOS watch!

Eventually, the project didn't reach its funding goal and every contributor got refunded. This is probably for the best since Mr Sathasivan disappeared without a single word.

Overall, this experience showed that AsteroidOS was capable of working with OEMs and mobilizing its community for a hardware project. The project carried on stronger than ever and we still believe that a serious AsteroidOS watch project would have all the chances of succeeding.

... And what's left for 2018

Libasteroid : a cross-platform BLE connectivity library for AsteroidOS interoperability

: a cross-platform BLE connectivity library for AsteroidOS interoperability Asteroid-ctrl : a dummy test application demoing libasteroid

: a dummy test application demoing libasteroid This "News" section: the project's communication has always lacked behind its development, let's improve this in 2018!

New FOSDEM community dinner : let us know on Twitter if you'd be interested in joining us

: let us know on Twitter if you'd be interested in joining us Starfish : a SailfishOS app relying on libasteroid (already a work in progress)

: a SailfishOS app relying on libasteroid (already a work in progress) AsteroidOSSync stability improvements : various AsteroidOSSync bug fixes to polish BLE's usability

: various AsteroidOSSync bug fixes to polish BLE's usability v1.0 release: the stable release of Asteroid has never been closer, stay tuned!

Join us!

The new year already started with several major developments including:The next few months of development also promise exciting news with the following planned announcements:

As a final note, please note that you are very welcome to join the AsteroidOS project by attending community meetings, joining the IRC channel, translating the project, contributing to one of the various open GitHub issues and many other tasks.

Happy new year!

Written by Florent Revest on the 10/01/2018