BadaDroid is Alive and Kicking! Android Marshmallow Available for Samsung GT-S8500 Wave

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Android is a unique mobile OS, as it can be installed on various devices including phones, tablets, watches or even cars. It’s one of the most flexible operating systems and due to its open-source nature, it’s ported to even more devices.

Most of OEMs decided to use it on the phones, but s particular Samsung created an own system called Bada, which was later replaced by Tizen. Neither of them became successful.

Back in 2011, Samsung released the Wave line of devices. It was popular mostly in central Europe, including my homeland, Poland. Phones like the S8500 or S8503 were running Bada OS, which fell short of users’ expectations. Bada lacked the ability to customize a single element of the ROM, it was also choppy and buggy. A group of developers including Rebellos, volk204, Oleg_K, mijoma, srg.mstr and many more decided to tackle Bada’s bootloader to make it work with Android. The attempt succeeded and on early 2012, Rebellos announced a project called BadaDroid. There is a tracker thread in which Rebellos shows the progress of the project.

Due to hardware similarities, it was possible to adapt the Samsung Galaxy S’ kernel source to be used with Wave devices. Developers were working for over a year to iron out all the remaining bugs and thanks to their efforts, Android on Bada devices became a reality. Ever since its release, BadaDroid sources were updated to run Android 4.x and 5.x Lollipop.

After four years of successes, users can now install the newest version of Android on their Waves. Android 6.0 is available in OmniROM flavor by XDA Senior Member . It’s absolutely amazing to see another device never designed to work with Android reaching the point like this.

If you still have your Samsung S8500 Wave somewhere, head over to the development thread to give it a chance to boot up Marshmallow.