Flipper Devices keeps Flipper Zero firmware alive, with users doing more of the work

Why it matters

Flipper Devices is showing what happens when a beloved open-source hardware product matures: the founder has to protect the installed base while moving the team toward the next product cycle.

Pavel Zhovner is keeping Flipper Zero firmware development alive, but Flipper Devices is ending full-time internal feature work on the hacker gadget and moving requests, votes and much of the contribution burden into GitHub Discussions, according to a July 1st company blog post and a July 5th report from BleepingComputer.

That is a product decision wrapped in community management. Flipper Zero is no longer a crowdfunded oddity looking for proof that it can ship. It is a mass-market security toy, testing tool and open-source hardware platform with a user base the company says has passed one million. Zhovner wrote that real-time communication with that many users was no longer feasible, and that Flipper Devices had disabled direct messages on social channels because the request volume made it hard to separate broad demand from one-off noise.

Zhovner's own origin story makes the shift sharper. In a 2020 Hackaday project log, he traced Flipper Zero back to an irritation familiar to hardware people: useful hacking tools were often bare boards, sharp pins and wires that were annoying to carry. After using Pwnagotchi and tinkering with Tamagotchi hardware, he wrote that he wanted a device that combined the fun of a Tamagotchi, the look of a retro handheld and enough capability to explore the wireless systems around him. Designer friends pushed the project from a DIY idea toward a factory-made product.

Alex Kulagin, one of Flipper Zero's co-creators, put the thesis differently in a 2023 WIRED interview: "We want to help you understand something deeply, explore how it works, and explore the wireless world that's all around you but difficult to understand." That line still explains why the firmware fight matters. Flipper Devices sold a device whose identity depends on user curiosity, then reached the stage where user curiosity became too much for the internal team to process by chat, DMs and open-ended threads.

The new rules

The official firmware will be maintained with limited internal resources. Flipper Devices says its team will review community requests weekly, require feature requests to move through GitHub Discussions, prioritize requests by community votes and review pull requests under stricter rules. Firmware changes will also need integration and regression testing, with the company saying it will open part of that testing work to the community.

The constraint is partly technical. Zhovner wrote that Flipper Zero has only 700 KB of firmware flash available, which pushed Flipper Devices toward dynamic apps loaded from microSD and helped define the stable 1.0 firmware architecture. Firmware 1.0 arrived in 2024 after the Apps Catalog launch, with stabilized APIs and SDKs for app developers, according to the company. The latest stable GitHub release listed for the firmware is version 1.4.3, released on December 5th, 2025.

The new review posture also shows how AI coding tools are changing open-source maintenance for embedded hardware. Flipper Devices says it will pay particular attention to AI-generated code that touches low-level libraries and is hard to verify, along with changes that affect the user interface or require documentation edits. That is a narrow, practical warning rather than a broad anti-AI stance: firmware bugs on a pocket device that touches radios, access-control systems and GPIO pins carry different risk than a broken web app component.

A startup protecting the old product while building the next ones

The timing is not random. Flipper Devices is trying to protect the device that made its name while shifting engineering attention to new hardware. BleepingComputer noted that the firmware announcement follows Flipper Devices' push toward Flipper One, an open Linux networking device still in development, and Busy Bar, a productivity display slated for open sale on July 14th in the U.S., U.K., Europe and Canada.

TechCrunch reported in May that Flipper Devices had sold more than one million Flipper Zero units and generated more than $150 million in sales. That moves the firmware decision out of hobby-project territory. A million-device installed base expects bug fixes, compatibility and trust. A hardware startup with new products in development cannot keep treating every user request as a founder-led support thread.

Flipper Devices is also no longer a tiny launch team. Its jobs page says Flipper Devices has 80 people across different parts of the world and is working on its third product. That headcount is still small for a company supporting a global hardware base, companion apps, firmware, developer tooling, manufacturing, compliance, support and new product development.

The official Flipper Zero product page shows why maintenance remains a serious obligation. The device bundles sub-1 GHz radio, 125 kHz RFID, NFC, Bluetooth LE, infrared, USB, GPIO and microSD into a small handheld. Its appeal is breadth: it can read, emulate or interact with many everyday systems that were previously invisible to most users. That breadth also means firmware quality is central to the product's reputation, especially because Flipper Zero has attracted scrutiny from marketplaces, customs authorities and security observers over how easily a tool for learning can be mistaken for, or repurposed as, a tool for abuse.

The trade Flipper is making

Flipper Devices is asking its community to accept a more formal bargain: the company will keep the official firmware maintained, but users will need to do the work of writing clear requests, voting on priorities, submitting pull requests and helping validate changes. For open-source hardware companies, that is the difference between community as audience and community as operating model.

The risk is that voting systems favor loud demand over long-term product health. Embedded firmware also has invisible work that users rarely vote for: regression testing, documentation, compatibility, security constraints, radio compliance and boring bug fixes. Flipper Devices is trying to solve that by keeping internal oversight while letting the community surface priorities. Whether that process works will depend on how often voted requests turn into shipped improvements, and how firmly Flipper Devices protects the official firmware from changes that make the device harder to support.

The upside is equally clear. Zhovner built Flipper Zero because existing tools felt too awkward, too bare and too unfriendly for the kind of curiosity he wanted to encourage. A larger community can keep extending that idea long after the original team has moved some of its attention to Flipper One and Busy Bar. The harder founder job now is deciding which parts of the original promise Flipper Devices must keep owning itself, and which parts can safely be handed to the people who made the device bigger than a gadget launch.