This is good time
AEON new roadmap
The main focus of the roadmap going forward is to rebase against the current Monero. Monero has had many improvements LMDB storage of the blockchain, added features including view-only wallets, message signing, and many others. Monero adds the ability to prove payments using tx keys, which is necessary to trade on decentralized exchanges such as bitsquare.io.
The other major area of work in Monero is the upcoming GUI wallet, which is a brand new design. While AEON already has a GUI wallet using the old Neozaru open source, that upstream code is no longer maintained. Instead the Monero GUI will be ported to AEON.
Of great importance, Monero is in the process of adding RingCT, which hides the amounts of payments and improves overall privacy and fungibility significantly, with little to no additional transaction size (since RingCT replaces denominations). Some of the items from the existing AEON roadmap, such as the ability to do signature trimming and faster syncing of non-fully-validating nodes, are being incorporated in Monero's RingCT implementation, so those will be brought here as well. Finally, there are a number of other improvements such as better support for full-transparency (including spending) on view key wallets and proof-of-reserves. AEON will gain all of these features for free while it migrates to a newer, better maintained code base.
What will be retained in AEON? First of all, our lightweight and mobile-friendly PoW which allows verifying the blockchain around 4x faster or more. Second we will retain the ability to do lightweight non-anonymous payments without compromising privacy of other users (Monero addressed the privacy issues by completely banning these). Finally the pruning branch will be adopted for Monero's LMDB storage. The independent branding, development, and community will allow AEON to continue to thrive as a separate platform while sharing many of the technical underpinnings from Monero and Cryptonote.
I'll take TechorMarketing's question above as a suggestion and include the lightweight encrypted message proposal as part of the roadmap as well, and I am open to other suggestions on similar experimental enhancements.
Overall this gives us something closer to a Litecoin model (in terms of sharing more code with the upstream project while maintaining an indepednent identity and leadership, along with some new and experimental features), which will continue to be sustainable going forward despite limited development resources. Thus everyone can have a high degree of confidence that AEON will continue to be maintained and remain usable.
Keeping the zero mixin transactions is a great idea and a good differentiation from Monero. As well, perhaps we should figure out how to effectively focus on letting mobile games/users interact with Aeon in various ways. An easy to utilize API could allow iOS games and apps to offer Aeon/ions as rewards in mobile games and allow people to purchase in-game assets with Aeon/ions. Perhaps if a mobile ad-server were set up that dealt in Aeon, and allowed businesses to purchase ads in Aeon that were then piped to participating mobile games, that profit could automatically be distributed to users/publishers of said games in a decentralized/pseudo-decentralized way.
Essentially, you can create apps which allow you and your users to get paid automatically without worrying about any middle men or profit cuts. This creates built in utility for the token with a secondary layer/service. I know perhaps I'm dreaming, so feel free to rebut the idea. As well, I realize it would require a great deal of work/programming, so perhaps may be unfeasible at the current time.