Tower smart app discontinued?

[souzaux]

Personally, was the Droidplanner / Tower smart app discontinued?

[snorkel123]

Reply from ArduPilot:

Really it’s not a matter of “finding someone”. Someone needs to volunteer to do it. It’s been a long time and there aren’t really any willing people apparently. Aero-Hawk forked it and updated it for the latest releases of Android. I think it has a few odds and ends specifically for their vehicles but it’s still tower and just does what tower has always done. Nothing new really. The Solex app has LOTS of new improvements you can use for ArduPilot now.

Same question here.

First and foremost, there should be main maintainer that will coordinate work.
Fredia left for Google.

Either Fredia will transfer ownership (I don't believe so)
or someone needs to create fork from which work will be continued.

Someone also needs to re-publish Tower on Google Play.

As to why continue this project:

• It can serve as GCS on its own

• It can serve as basis for creating custom GCS for 3-rd parties.
  For custom GCS creator makes sense to concentrate on Android solely
  as Android phones are cheap and widespread, can be in any form-factor, some support IP 67 protection

One should note however that there is existing alternative Qgroundcontrol,
supported by Lorenz Meier, creator of Pixhawk, and with active community.
Their possible downside is that they use C (and some cross-platform technology) for UI -
which is laggy and a bit old-fashioned.

[snorkel123]

To be honest I would become maintainer itself.

If so I wonder from what to start:

• Fork project and nominate myself.
  But how to gain attention so that I am not alone in my pursuit?

• Obtain write access from main maintainers?
  But I doubt it it possible as Fredia (former dev) has left

It seems like fork option is the most suitable

[billbonney]

I have done some changes to make Tower work with newer releases, I just haven't had the time to make release to the store. I have everything required to do so. Solex is a non-starter as an Open Source project and not pushed changes made to the android dronekit common repo.

You can fork tower or we can figure out how to get changes you have made to the project published as Tower

[snorkel123]

@billbonney Great to hear from maintainers!

Alright, I made a fork, where I will lead organized development of Tower.
It is here: https://github.com/AlexShafir/Tower

For now, I see #1 task is to move Tower to MVP architecture

[HyGy]

That is really cool!!!!

You can give a new name too like: skyscraper :)

[HyGy]

@AlexShafir the beta tesgint thing is real (at the bottom of the page)?

[snorkel123]

@AlexShafir the beta tesgint thing is real (at the bottom of the page)?

No, I just forked it, that's it

[snorkel123]

I made Tower compile with latest Android Studio, Gradle, Kotlin
See: https://github.com/AlexShafir/Tower/tree/resurrection

It fails in runtime, which is fine at the moment

[guiseco]

Very Nice!