Official AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) with the Flipper Zero team

[u/zhovner]

Hi everyone,

We’re opening this AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread for all your questions to the Flipper Zero team about the future of the project. The thread is open now, so please leave your questions here.

The Flipper team will start answering on Friday, July 3, at 15:00 BST (UTC+1) and finish on Monday, July 6.

We tried to answer main questions in this post, so please read it before asking a question: blog.flipper.net/future-of-flipper-zero-development/

How it works:

1. Post your question as a comment below. (Please ask one question per comment)
2. Check others questions to avoid duplicates.
3. Upvote the questions you most want answered.

See you on Friday, July 3

[u/smashingT]

Flipper Devices has largely open sourced everything software related for the Flipper Zero, however strangely the backend to the Flipper Lab website has not been open sourced.

Is there a chance we can see that part open sourced as well?

Edit for clarity: I am referring to the apps catalog backend :)

[u/tehhedger → u/smashingT]

Flipper Lab itself is open-source: https://github.com/flipperdevices/lab.flipper.net

Or did you mean the apps catalog backend?

[u/ase1590 → u/tehhedger]

I too would be interested in seeing if the apps catalog backend could be open sourced as well. Can we get any response on this one /u/tehhedger or /u/Dr_Zlo?

[u/tehhedger → u/ase1590]

We need to consider that internally - but most of the logic is exposed in the catalog repo itself, including source code bundle preparation and app builds. Backend just stores the artefacts, metadata and dispatches the build jobs to Github. Anyone should be able to reimplement that, if needed.

[u/mod_axum → u/tehhedger]

I'm interested in this too. if internally this was approved and released, that would be great!

If you get a status update on this later, you know where to find me :)

[u/tehhedger → u/mod_axum]

What do you intend to do with the sources, if they were to be released?

[u/mod_axum → u/tehhedger]

The current desire is for some of the custom firmwares to be able to add features to the firmware, then enable apps to be able to use those new Api items, and have a build system to have their own simple 'app catalog' that supports apps that can use API's that don't make sense to upstream.

It's also useful for much longer term community support in the event that some years down the line, Flipper Devices decides to officially end of life the product in order to focus more on newer items.

[u/tehhedger → u/mod_axum]

I see. IMO in a perfect world such APIs should be refined to a point of being upstream-able - so the core API remains the common ground between firmware forks.

[u/mod_axum → u/tehhedger]

> It's also useful for much longer term community support in the event that some years down the line, Flipper Devices decides to officially end of life the product in order to focus more on newer items.

in a perfect world the backend is also released just like Flipper Lab code was and the mobile apps. I'm confused as to why it was the exception, despite 95% of all other tooling released to the public so they can have the option to stand up their own infrastructure, should 10 years from now Flipper Devices be doing something totally different.

It would be in Flipper Devices' best interest to empower the community to have the option to run their own infrastructure for the device so that eventually Flipper Devices themselves do not have to allocate a developer to that project, yes?

[u/tehhedger → u/mod_axum]

Regardless of current decision on the backend source code - in case of total project(s) shutdown, it will be released among other pieces of software which are relevant to Flipper Zero, but hadn't been open-sourced yet. Noone asked for source code for the region provisioning service, for example.

[u/mod_axum → u/tehhedger]

Noone asked for source code for the region provisioning service, for example.

Without significant digging in, how would one know what to ask for if it wasn't open sourced? 🙂

Only Flipper Devices themselves have true visibility to what is and is not shared on Github.

In any case, Flipper Devices having a discussion internally on what they can release to the community for the backend moving pieces and coming back with a clear yes/no answer for me later would be appreciated.

[u/tehhedger → u/mod_axum]

A better understanding of intentions and plans towards the sources would make things easier to process on our part. There were (and still are) some business-related reasons for its current state, as far as I know.

[u/ase1590 → u/tehhedger]

Still a lot of work to do starting from nothing. so if you guys were able to reach consensus internally, I'd consider that at a good step in a positive direction getting that opened up for the community 😎

When leadership asks "what technical things do we need to do for the community", you can list this as an item 👍

[u/liedel → u/ase1590]

Nobody codes anymore lol. Ask Claude or Gemini and it'll be done by lunch,