All the official OS images are like 10 months old per the web page? But if you look at the actual images files many of the images are like March or April 2023!
Is IndieDroid NOVA no longer supported? I realize the vendor does not support any of the OSes, and I know the OSes are community supported, but really, it does some like a ball has been dropped here?
Trying to understand if there is any merit in recommending the IndieDroid NOVA if the support is just not there?
“Is IndieDroid NOVA no longer supported?” - it was never officially supported. This is just a rebranded chinese 9tripod board which was meant to have “documentation and support based in U.S.A” - whatever that means, given that most chinese boards are actually doing better than this and the bar is super low.
What happened in reality is: they sent out the lowest spec boards to a few developers in the community with the hope that they would provide support for free. They have indeed provided some initial images and then moved on with their lives.
They aren’t paying anyone to work on software, as such you cannot expect updates or any kind of support.
When it comes to such boards, I’d suggest sticking to popular ones. I won’t name any brands here so it isn’t considered advertisement, but you can google them. They’re cheaper, have much better I/O (e.g. M.2 slots) and benefit from greater community interest.
It’s a shame because if ameriDroid put a bit of thought into this and considered paying/hiring 1-2 people rather than wasting all money on dev samples trying to support dozens of half-working distros (jack of all trades, master of none), they could’ve had an excellent official OS image and documentation. Even if the board is technically inferior in terms of I/O to other offerings, having good software support is a huge selling point and people wouldn’t even care as much about pricing.
Thanks for your feedback.
We’ve been involved in the SBC market for more than 12 years. We looked at what the foreign manufacturers were doing and noted the things we thought we could do better, and decided to have a go at it. We had a specific budget that we could allocate. If we were unsuccessful, losing those funds would definitely hurt, but not cause us to go bankrupt unless other unforeseen circumstances came along. As with most things, reality is much more complicated than it comes across to the “armchair quarterback”. While we had a lot of experience with the game, we were still somewhat in that “armchair quarterback” position.
We have put – and continue to put – a lot of thought, strategy and investment into this project. Although the timeline from conception to completion extended beyond our initial expectations and costs were higher than anticipated, we remained committed throughout. After the initial significant investment to get the project rolling, we faced challenges with extremely limited control over the design process and communication issues with 9tripod. By the time our board overcame numerous unexplained delays and was ready for the market, competitors had introduced similar products at lower prices, creating a highly competitive environment.
Despite these hurdles, we continued to push forward. We distributed engineering samples to developers, many of whom are our friends in the dev community. Their collaboration and support were invaluable. We financially compensated several developers several thousand dollars each due to their dedicated OS development efforts, in addition to a representative agent in China. In addition to the astronomical inventory investment, we invested around $50,000 in developing OS images and documentation for the Nova, along with significant investments from our internal team.
As a US-based company entering the market with our first board, we faced stiff competition from established players, particularly those based in China with better access to suppliers and factories. Additionally, import tariffs of approximately 30% further impacted our price competitiveness. Most Chinese board manufacturers avoid these tariffs by selling direct-to-consumer.
While we hoped for more support from US-based companies finding value in us developing a natively-supported line of SBCs, we understand that several external factors influenced our journey. Despite the challenges, we remain dedicated to exploring opportunities and overcoming obstacles in this dynamic market, and we continue to invest in the Nova.
At this point, it is obvious that we need to redesign our OS downloads page to highlight specific distros that are particularly complete and/or actively developed, while still allowing our users to download any of the numerous distros that our dev community has produced.
Nice, very politically correct response. But it does not address the core question, is there any active supprot for the Nova? Apparently not. So the Nova is basically a failed SBC platform, since there is not on going support, at the OS level, for example. This is a shame, because it is wonderful hardware. But great hardware is useless without current supported software. How can anyone recommend such hardware without active software support?