An Open Call To Flipper Devices | Spicemesh tech blogBackground Knowledge#<br>Flipper Devices is the company behind the viral and well known open source tech gadget known as the Flipper Zero that began shipping in 2022.<br>In order to get community engagement and real time feedback, as well as foster an environment where people would make tools for the Flipper Zero, the company set up both an English-speaking Discord server and Russian-speaking Telegram community. It became quickly apparent that the Discord server would be much larger than the Telegram community. Between 2022 and early 2024, staff at most levels were active at least once a week in these communities. This included developers, artists, and community managers. Participation by staff I feel genuinely has helped kick off community code contributions, artwork, and application development for the device.<br>I also want to make something very clear here going forward: The Flipper Devices developers are NOT the target of any blame in the events below.<br>In most companies, developers are not the ones making decisions that lead to outcomes like this. Instead, they are simply victims to project management, resource allocation, and planning of the people above them. This is almost certainly a failure of project and community management by their C-Suite.<br>The Decline#<br>As time went on, active staff engagement with the community started slowly declining. Any of the non-technical community managers that Flipper Devices employed were mostly there to oversee simple housekeeping activities such as spam removal, rules compliance, and basic support for shipment issues or device support tickets. Their scope was fairly limited. This however initially wasn’t a ‘huge’ problem. Code contributions could still be submitted and accepted in the Github codebases the company maintained. One of the developers who enjoyed social interaction also set out to do his best to hold a Questions & Answers session after the release of each notable Flipper Zero firmware update.<br>This at least provided the community with a periodic opportunity to get highly technical questions answered. Unfortunately this too was not something that would last. The developer hosting these events left at the end of Feb. 2025, right around when Flipper Devices decided to focus their development team into getting the Busy Bar’s firmware and hardware in a good state for an eventual retail sales release. Many felt that the Busy Bar itself was a massive departure from the original direction of the company which made its name with its original tech gadget multi-tool, and it was disappointing that it appeared that staff were pulled away from the community to work on this project and possibly other projects in the background.<br>The departure of one of the founding developers, which was the same one that ran the questions and answers event, also raised a lot of questions within the community. After that departure, releases began slowing down for the device. This eventually culminated in the very last release done, 1.4.3, being purely a minor bugfix. From the community’s perspective, it felt like we were simply left to our own devices with no direct line of communication of what was happening internally. We could only speculate that development and community resources were pulled into another project, with our only guess being potentially the Busy Bar.<br>The Problems Begin#<br>With the pull back away from the community and focus on other projects, other problems began to appear a few months into 2026:<br>The Flipper Zero Firmware no longer had manpower to accept new contributions/pull requests<br>The Flipper Zero Application Catalog no longer had anyone to approve new apps, which led to new apps being blocked from release as well as existing apps being held back to older prior approved versions.<br>It took a few months, but the app catalog problem was eventually mediated by giving access to Flipper Devices’ app catalog to one of the long time developers in the community. This at least allowed apps to progress once more.<br>Unfortunately, the issues with the Flipper Zero still persist at the time of this article’s writing, and 6 months have elapsed since the last update. Pull requests from long time contributors have likewise have been frozen for an equal amount of time.<br>These issues have continued to persist without Flipper Devices stating their intentions with the Flipper Zero codebase and the community is simply left to wonder if the project has reached end of support or if development is simply temporarily frozen. No information has been shared on if or how they plan to transition the firmware to be community led. Any communication would allow for the community to have clarity and plan accordingly.<br>On the social media side, problems also began appearing regarding their community. One of the content makers that popularized usage of the Flipper Zero, who had prior provided many quality videos and guides...