Paranoid Android teaser image suggests new update is in development

Things had been quiet on the Paranoid Android front since last year. The Android ROM project was updated to version 6.0 based on Android Marshmallow around June, but it has slowly fallen off the radar since.

Yesterday, hope for a future update was rekindled after a message was posted on the official Paranoid Android Google+ page. The post contained an image with the text “paranoidandroid” alongside the hashtag “#stayparanoid”. Keen-eyed commenters also spotted a faded “O” symbol at the bottom of the image, which apparently alludes to a revamped version of Paranoid Android’s unique “Pie” navigation controls.

The Paranoid Android project lead, Arz Bhatia, subsequently took to the comments to offer an explanation regarding the project and its current status:

“Just to clear out a few things – We try to release builds when they’re stable enough to be called public releases and abandoned the concept of nightlies a long time back.

Paranoid Android 6 was released when it was stable enough for daily use and was updated only when there were critical bug fixes needed. Due to the lack of manpower, we shifted our focus from features first to stability first.

By head count, we only have 3-5 active developers working on the project – the team is still amazing but we lost a few of our key members a while back.

Paranoid Android is still a community project, it’s free to use and open for all. The developers working on the project do it for the community with no profit-making involved. I’m here to represent my team and the comments over here are not really helping in motivating them to continue working on the project.

We’re passionate about building good products and we only release when we’ve reached the level of goodness, perfection & stability that we had in mind when we first started working on the project.”

XDA Developers spotted movements on the Paranoid Android Gerrit regarding Android Nougat also, so it seems like things are happening, even if there’s no clear message about precisely what we’re in store for.

In a later comment, Bhatia said: “We update when there’s a need for an update. This is Paranoid Android, not Windows 10.”

Are you looking forward to more from Paranoid Android? Give us your thoughts in the comments.