me176c-dev/me176c

Project overview for ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (ME176C(X))

me176c's Issues

Camera

Only opening this to make it clear that camera is NOT working on the ROM, and to document the current status.

The whole camera implementation is a mess of many proprietary libraries, additional kernel drivers and much more. With an upstream kernel, it is likely that changes would be necessary in several of these components, but this isn't possible without the source code.

It might be possible to re-investigate this in case Android-IA releases an open-source camera HAL. But even in that case, it would require a lot of time, effort and luck.

GPS

Only opening this to make it clear that GPS is NOT working on the ROM, and to document the current status.

The situation on our tablet appears to be the following: the tablet has a combined Bluetooth/GPS chip, which communicate over the same interface. What they did on the stock ROM is hack Android's Bluetooth implementation (bluetooth.default.so) to additionally provide a communication channel for the GPS implementation (located at /data/gps/brcm_gps_unix_socket). Without this change, there is no way the (also proprietary) GPS implementation can communicate with the chip.

Normally changes like these should be made in the device specific hardware implementation (HAL), but for some reason they decided to hack it into Android's Bluetooth implementation directly. Because of that, it is pretty much impossible to port this to newer Android versions - with each major update the Bluetooth implementation is also updated with new features and other changes - the old version wouldn't work at all on newer Android versions. Bluetooth (and GPS) is entirely broken when trying to use it on Nougat.

This does not only affect our tablet, but also some other smartphones from ASUS, e.g. the Zenfone 5.

With that said, it's unlikely that GPS will ever be working on this ROM, at least not unless ASUS releases the necessary source code for this setup. And this is likely never going to happen.