News ⟩ Looking back on the year 2017 for AsteroidOS




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

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

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

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:

Join us!

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