Paranoid Android, one of the most popular custom ROMs on the Android scene, is now completely open source, with all parts of it now available for members of the community to use and modify. All of Paranoid Android’s original features like the Color Engine and Accidental Touch are hence open to anyone and can be compiled right alongside stock AOSP or put into other ROMs. The full codebase is available on GitHub and can be contributed to with approval, integrated into original projects, or simply recompiled from scratch for just about any Android device. This means that AOSPA can now expand to any device with a willing maintainer, rather than only those that the official AOSPA team wants to support on their own.
Unfortunately, many of the features that graced the older versions of Paranoid Android since the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean days, such as per-app DPI changing, are not available in the new project. According to Alex Naidis, one of the key developers on the team, many of those functionalities have since been supplanted by those that Google has put into AOSP. Naidis said that the point of Paranoid Android and AOSPA is not to duplicate or tweak AOSP, but to add to it, giving users an entirely new feature set that does things that stock Android can’t, rather than doing the same things that stock Android does.
Naidis also revealed that the partnership between the Nextbit and Paranoid Android teams will expand to Razer, now that the iconic gaming brand has bought Nexbit. The AOSPA team will be working closely with Razer to develop and refine AOSPA, though Naidis was not allowed to comment on whether Razer would be shipping any future products that took advantage of those changes. Naidis also talked about the fall and resurrection of Paranoid Android; after the Android 4.4 (KitKat) and Android 5.0 (Lollipop) iterations of the OS, many team members were hired by OnePlus. The few members left on the team eventually ended up raising Paranoid Android to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), but progress was essentially dead, and the ROM was not as unique or full-featured as it used to be. It was in 2016 that Naidis contacted a OnePlus One community developer to talk about creating a custom Android ROM, and ended up working on the new AOSPA, which would go on to branch out to Paranoid Android that custom ROM users know and love today.