

This undertaking was huge and presented issues that have been resolved (thanks everyone for your patience!), and we’re happy to report that the forums are now stable and relatively fast, and our members have been pretty happy with the upgrade. The most significant decision we’ve made recently was to move from an outdated software platform (vBulletin) to something more modern and flexible (XenForo). However, it’s been five years, and we find ourselves having to make some difficult decisions as we look towards the future of XDA where we plan to make XDA the best place in the world to talk about your tech. In addition to being an app platform, XDA Labs also included a way to browse the XDA forums through a ground-up forum app we built in house using our own API. Not only that, but Labs let users get early access to new versions of popular apps with an update mechanism that would “push” updates to phones often days or weeks before Google or other big developers did full rollouts of new app versions. Labs had other features such as beta and alpha channels (before Google added the same to Google Play) to enable developers to have more control over their app distribution and testing. The primary purpose was to create an alternate app distribution platform for developers that couldn’t host on Google Play. It was five years ago that we launched XDA Labs after hundreds of hours of development.
