Hey Till.

I recently spent a long time thinking about our recent actions in the team. We had many calls with different people having different points of view. I spent plenty of time trying to figure all this out, and I have come to a conclusion.

First of all, I don’t see that anything has been taken away as conclusions from our calls. Nothing has changed since then and I have not seen any action taken by you or others responsible in the team. And I also noticed that in the admin chat. Each time I was throwing an idea or suggestion, you instantly disagreed with me. And when I asked you why you either ignored my question or simply gave me a generic response like “I have a better idea in plan”. And those were not only my observations. I have talked with other team members, including former ones you worked with, like Abhijeet, and they mostly agreed with my thesis. But when I started to talk about him, you clearly didn’t want to know about his point of view.

Then we had the drama about the OnePlus developer units. And to be clear, it was not about getting a free phone. When we had our first talk on Friday with Nicholas Chum, you were not able to explain why Chris got the second developer unit first. You were also escaping from any responsibility for that saying that we would need to have Chris in our call because you didn’t want to talk behind his back. So okay, we had our second call with Chris on Monday, the 15th April, to which we invited Lumiq and Nico as well. The call went badly with Chris not being open to discuss his decisions and actions. Instead, he found accusing me of lack of communication in situations where I felt offended a better way to deal with the problem.

So yes, I left all team chats after finding out the fact of Chris being in the developer program as the second member. I did it like all the previous times I left the chats because I was in a state of rage. But this time I took the time to calm down myself and rethink the current situation.

Thus, I made my decision to gather others’ opinions. I asked a few other people I trust about what they think about this, and they — just like me — came out with mixed opinions. You might have heard it from Nicholas Chum in our first call — he was one of the people I asked in the first place. Then he also brought up the situation on your tweet, where Radek and other friends started to make assumptions based on the information they had from me. It is said that I made him write those, while in the meantime it was just his reaction to the entire situation.

In fact, there was one situation that kept my eye. After Radek’s tweet, you accused me of sharing confidential information. But, in the meantime, you not only didn’t inform anyone in the team about the fact that Lawnchair is becoming a part of the OnePlus developer program but also complained about leaking something that already was public. In that situation, I was not sure whether I should start asking on Twitter or disclose that the second unit got in the hands of Chris, but I was sure there was something going wrong. And, just to be honest, that already stunk a lot. People even started asking me if I had got the second unit, and I had to honestly deny.

But, definitely, the shadiest thing about this was that nobody, except you and Chris, was informed about the developer program. I even had a conversation with paphonb about this, and even he was surprised that Chris is getting a developer unit, while all he’s doing is just keeping the Twitter account alive. Keeping such an important aspect of a project out of the vision of other members is definitely out of place.

I also noticed that you rather defend Chris all the time instead of realizing what mistakes has he done. I don’t require from you that you take responsibility for his actions, we’re obviously here mature enough. But when I pointed you out that Chris is basically using the Lawnchair brand Twitter account to like all his personal tweets himself, you left the call without any goodbye and wrote me that “I don’t think this call is going to be of any value for anyone”. To my opinion, if you finding out someone’s mistakes saying that the discussion doesn’t make sense at all, is not a good sign of a healthy relationship between you and Chris, and also other team members.

You see, Lawnchair is, or was, a fun project to me. It has always found my second home, and I knew that I could get help from you anytime I needed. My life is not that easy as it was back then in Germany. I am now in my final year of high school, with final exams beginning in roughly 10 days. You were already aware of that situation, and instead of helping me, I was being faced with messages like “you rant more about nova than you work on lc” and not getting any support from some team members. Also, I noticed the same on social media, where literally none of my recent tweets about anything related in the DevOps work I did for Lawnchair has been shared on the brand account. Those actions made me think that despite you say I am an integral part of the team and the team needs me, I am found useless by other members.

Furthermore, I have slowly started to notice a lack of trust in many scenarios for my person. It was said that trust is an integral part of such a project when it comes to development. Last year you decided to be more serious with version 2 of Lawnchair and with that said you then continued to work on a secret integration to Lawnchair which was the Sesame search app. But looking at the Twitter account and those tweets, I kinda can’t understand in which direction you are really going. The thing is, you say that things are decided in the team chat, but I noticed that you rather only discuss things with Chris and keep everything in secret. In my eyes, I would not trust Chris anymore at all, as his actions from the past make it look like you were being abused to reach his goals. As a project leader, you really should not prefer a PR guy over the rest of the development team, especially when it comes to maintaining the functionality of the entire app infrastructure and its future.

To sum up, I don’t feel comfortable in the team facing some recent events. It took me a long time and I do not feel like doing this, but I think that I was being led to this point for a while. It’s time to finally make a decision on my future in the Lawnchair project.

I know we had a long good time right here, but after consideration, I’m officially leaving the Lawnchair development team. My decision is final and there is nothing that can pull me back.

I will leave the infrastructure as it is, but will no longer provide any updates or support and eventually turn some services off when it becomes unprofitable. This might also include reducing the number of simultaneously running CI jobs and otherwise downgrading the resources when they would be required for other uses. However, I’m open for further contact and I hope you either find an agreement to continue the use of my shared services or decide to find an alternative, that is up to you right now.

A quick shout out to the Lawnchair team: thanks a lot for being nearly 2 years with all of you in the team, I have learned a lot about Android app development and it gave me the motivation to do more than I thought I was capable of. It’s been a great time for me and I’m feeling like I’m leaving my family home, but we have to go on. I wish the best for you all.

From Kraków with love,

David Sn

Ex-DevOps and Developer at Lawnchair Launcher