XDA Developers Forum

The XDA Developers Forum is a community-driven platform for Android and Windows Phone enthusiasts, founded in 2003 by XDA. It is owned by XDA, a subsidiary of DragonBorne LLC, and is headquartered in Miami, Florida. The forum boasts over 10 million registered members and averages over 20 million monthly page views, making it one of the largest and most influential online communities for mobile operating system customization. Its revenue is generated primarily from forum subscriptions, premium features, and targeted advertising, with an estimated annual revenue of 5 million USD. Technically, the forum runs on a custom-built vBulletin-based platform with extensive modifications to support a vast number of subforums dedicated to specific devices, ROM development, and application development. It features a robust search functionality powered by Elasticsearch, allowing users to find threads, guides, and discussions from its extensive archive of over 50 million posts. The platform integrates with GitHub, allowing developers to share and collaborate on projects directly from forum threads. XDA is renowned for hosting development projects such as the XDA Developers App, which provides a mobile interface for accessing the forum and includes features like push notifications for followed threads. The community is also credited with pioneering many custom ROMs and modifications that have shaped the modern Android ecosystem, with its developers often being the first to discover and publish methods for unlocking bootloaders and gaining root access to new devices.