Latest Articles
Several months ago, we announced the new XDA app, built from the ground-up to be speedy and support many of the great features present in our new forum software, plus offer a range of personalization options like swipe gesture customization and more.
An Update on XDA Labs
XDA Labs is an app distribution platform for developers that couldn’t host on Google Play. And we have an important announcement to make.
It was five years ago that we launched XDA Labs after hundreds of hours of development. The primary purpose was to create an alternate app distribution platform for developers that couldn’t host on Google Play. Labs had other features such as beta and alpha channels (before Google added the same to Google Play) to enable developers to have more control over their app distribution and testing. Not only that, but Labs let users get early access to new versions of popular apps with an update mechanism that would “push” updates to phones often days or weeks before Google or other big developers did full rollouts of new app versions.
Today we have some news to share: over the coming weeks, we will be launching a ground-up forum redesign, which we’re calling XDA 2020. We’ve outgrown vBulletin (which was never designed to handle a community our size) and are moving to XenForo, a more modern platform that powers some of the biggest and best forum communities that you might already be a part of. While it’s difficult to pick an exact date for such a large project, we’re currently targeting mid-October 2020 to make this change and we’ll communicate more specifics as we get closer to the date.
We expect blockchain and digital currencies to have a significant impact on how we use our phones, including how we make and accept mobile payments. There are now hundreds of utility tokens, typically launched using the ERC-20 standard on the Ethereum blockchain, that provide users access to specific, usually decentralized, networks or services. It’s possible one-day soon our phones will become always-on nodes for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, routing peer-to-peer payments between and among people and we’ve never met. In the meantime, traders and investors speculate on the future by buying these coins, and there are dozens of apps for holding cryptocurrencies on any Android device. Assuming you use one that is reputable, these software wallets function perfectly well as hot wallets for walking-around money. Bitpie, for example, has built-in exchange functionality for managing your crypto investment account, and Coinomi supports a variety of altcoins.
Update! Along with Honor, we have selected the five lucky winners who will all be sent a free Honor 9 phone to do a video review. Here are the winners, along with a sample of their video capability. They will be contacted via email to arrange shipping for their Honor 9!
There are so many amazing things you can do with your phone, and so much of it is hidden away in the huge number of threads, posts and articles found on XDA. To fix this problem, we created an app called XDA Feed.
The Honor 8 comes in three different color options that really change the personality of your device. With the choices of Midnight Black, Sapphire Blue and White Pearl, we wanted to show you some pictures of each option and talk about the differences. Just a quick reminder about our partnership with Honor where you can win prizes just by being active in Honor forums on XDA. Also, be sure to check out the Honor 8 forums.
Honor 8 Camera Tip and Tricks
Check out these tips and tricks on how to get the best photos with the Honor 8. Make amazing time-lapses, light painting photos and much more.
With the dual lens setup on the Honor 8 phone, you can get some pretty amazing shots that remind us a lot of the capabilities of the Huawei P9. There are so many different things to experiment with when messing around with the camera on this device. I'll be going over some of the best features and how to use them to get the best result. In the mean time, make sure you check out our full review of the Honor 8, and also read about the partnership with have with Honor.
Ads suck, and we're really sorry about any ads that have annoyed you on XDA in the past. We're constantly yelling at our ad network people to remove any auto-play ads or ones that pop up in your face. In fact we have a thread dedicated to reporting bad ads, and we monitor it closely.
Create Your Own Forum on XDA
XDA now lets users come up with their own XDA forums to create all new sorts of discussions and developments!
Historically, adding a forum on XDA has been decided by having our intern spin around in an office chair, blindfolded, throwing darts at a board. Actually, we add forums based on which devices we think will have strong community support.
2019 Edit: The domain that Dev-Host was using is now serving up spammy ads and no longer offering those files for download. In order to combat that nuisance to the internet, we have replaced all links to Dev-Host with a redirect to this page. Check with the original poster to see if they can re-upload the file to one of the recommended providers below. Sorry for the inconvenience!
About a week ago we made some major changes to the XDA homepage, which we've always called the "Portal." A corner of the site that historically has been reserved to bring you the latest happening from the XDA forums, the new XDA Home goes a step beyond that by bringing a variety of new content types and higher quality features. We want this to be more than just a portal to the forums, but also a destination for all who, like us, revel in the everyday minutiae of mobile and mobile development.
Update!: We've chosen the winners of the contest. They are: petzku, Androidshek, mascaliente, damir1, nicopizza, dagoban, cretu01, JDLion, trusselo, mohfreestyl. These users will be contacted via XDA PM shortly with a code to unlock AirDroid premium. Thanks to everyone that participated in the contest, and thanks to AirDroid for the codes!
XDA is a huge global community. That makes managing the site a challenge, as everything from monitoring the ads to moderating the forums becomes exponentially more difficult when dealing with different countries, cultures, and belief systems. What many people don't know is that the second largest source of traffic on XDA after the USA is actually India. And until now, we've admittedly done a poor job of supporting these users. We've never had a defined process for adding India-only devices, and when we do add them, we've often relegated them to our legacy/low activity template. Often non-supported device discussion gets spread throughout the general forums, which is a problem for forum organization. But more and more, Indian users are becoming valuable members of the community---contributing knowledge, know-how, and excellent development work.
Today, we've enabled an option to authenticate your account with Google. This applies to both new and existing accounts. When creating a new account, you'll notice a new Google button at the top of the forums. When you set up your new XDA account with Google, you'll still need to set a username so that we can register the new account on our servers. Then for the future, you can login with Google at your convenience.
Today, we're excited to announce that we've made DevDB open to all users who want to post development projects. As a reminder, DevDB is XDA's new way of organizing development projects. We've been working on it for quite a while, and are pretty excited with how developers are already using it across the site.
One of our goals for the year has been to better organize all of the development works (ROMs, apps, tools, kernels, etc.) on XDA. We wanted this to be useful but also to have minimal impact on how developers post to XDA and on users who are happy with the current structure of the forums.
Sometimes it gets difficult to keep track of who has quoted you on XDA, and there's no way to know if someone "mentions" you in the course of discussion. Today we're rolling out a feature that operates much like @mentions work on Twitter and other social networks. By default, anytime someone puts the "@" symbol next to your username, you'll get an email notification (which you can turn off) and a vBulletin notification (which you can also turn off). Here's how it works.
XDA shut down the Marketplace forums several months ago, and since then we've been seeking a better alternative for our members to buy and sell phones and tablets. After an extensive search we've finally found the perfect replacement for the marketplace and simply a better way to buy and sell mobile devices: Swappa.
Along with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google is releasing a new version of the Play store that features magazine purchases (to go along with the new Play Magazines app), plus the ability to remote update and uninstall apps. Thanks to XDA Senior Member imbonez9, you can download the updated Play store APK now and get it running on your phone or tablet. Click onto the thread to download!