... Is the question we get asked ALL the time on this forum. This is currently being written on my phone so there might be some typos. I'm going to try and explain why we as a community find it so hard to develop for this phone and maybe how we can solve it.
1. AOSP
Maybe one of the biggest issues with this phone - AOSP, and the device tree.
When Sony made this phone in 2014, Jellybean was originally made with this phone and it was very stable - whereas Sony rushed the Kitkat update, meaning that many, many bugs were left unfixed making the phone unstable. Sony couldn't be bothered to then support this phone any further and left us with this heap of a mess. They also rushed the kernel too - and this is where AOSP comes into play.
I recently posted in the AOSP support fourms about our phone and Sony said to boot into AOSP the phone would need to have extensive changes to the kernel to boot into AOSP. The reason they would have to make these changes (and by that they mean rework the entire ROM and firmware) is because Sony rushed the Kitkat update making everything unstable. This means that we have no full device tree meaning that building from source is very difficult. This is why Caio's CM11 is very buggy atm. Hopefully Caio and Kizoky will make a breakthrough soon. Good luck!
2. Why do we have so many Stock UI modified ROMs? (Yes, there is more to it than that)
It literally links in with the top post.
Because we have no full sources, we can't build free, custom ROMs that have nothing to do with Sony.
Its very late where I am right now and tomorrow I'll finish and add to the post, and add some stuff in the future.
Good luck all with developing!
