Development Arrives on the MediaTek 6589T-Powered Wiko Stairway

Due to their bargain basement prices and high apparent value, it should come as no surprise that MediaTek devices are growing in popularity—especially in emerging markets such as India. But because of a frequent lack of GPL compliance and nonexistent developer openness, original development for these devices is slim to none.

Luckily, there is still progress being made on these devices. And despite an uphill battle, development is happening thanks to source code leaks and the hard work of developers like XDA Senior Recognized Developer Xplodwild and Senior Member Dr-Shadow in filling the gaps. And now after anunnecessarily long journey spearheaded by Forum Member bucefal82, quite a lot has been accomplished.

XDA Recognized Developer chrmhoffmann recently released a KitKat 4.4.2-based work-in-progress CM11 build for the Wiko Stairway. Currently, a decent amount is functional, including the device’s primary SIM, audio, sensors, WiFi, and application support. However, it’s not quite daily driver capable for most, as the camera, second SIM, hardware video decoding, GPS, GPU acceleration, and a few other items are still broken. Despite this, it’s good to see development advancing on the device, and on these closed platforms in general. And since the device runs on the MediaTek 6589T SoC, which is also seen on various other budget-friendly devices, so it’s only a matter of time before this also benefits other MediaTek device owners.

If you own a Wiko Stairway and would like to try out an unofficial CM11 build on your device, or if you own another MediaTek device and wish to port the ROM over, head over to theoriginal thread to get started.

[Many thanks to XDA Portal Supporter Titokhan for the tip!]