> It is sad that it takes a Meta developer having some fun to realize they should open up ADB.

Former facebook research lab twat here. It wasn't one dev.

We asked when they shitcanned portal (which was a great product, badly managed) to open it up. Infact one of the kernel devs made a very direct plea to allow the community to adopt the hardware so that we could avoid Ewaste.

It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)

However, portal was a casualty of the dash to VR. They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted. The idea was that they portal would be the "portal" to horizon worlds. this meant that they pushed back the plan for thirdparty app stores that would have meant you had something to actually do on the device.

neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed, even though the next gen device was actually a really great media device (wireless, removable charging stand, excellent speakers, but nothing to run on it.)

> It was denied because there are keys on the device that would leak if meta opened it up. (I'm not an android dev so I don't know the ins and outs of that)

Any idea what changed?

> neglect and stupidity from zuck meant that the portal was killed

Is Facebook really set up such that one person's whim is the single point of failure? Is there really no way for teams to progress projects with value somewhat independently?