I know that most customizability features that were once exclusive to custom roms are available for use right out of the box these days.
In the case of manufacturers like Samsung, I think,there are still no official builds of lineageOS for the newer phones after the galaxy s10 series.
I’m aware that GSI roms are available. My experience with GSI’s have been kinda bad. Most of the time they lack a lot of features which makes the phone not viable anymore. Then there are also the random UI bugs, which frustrate the hell out of the user.
I miss the old days when there were lots of custom roms, even for budget devices. I used to flash them when my phones were out of warranty. I could use my phone however I saw fit.
Is there no way to bring back these good times ? Or will the whole custom ROM community just shrink to the pixels and a select few devices ?
I think you meant it the other way around - “why custom ROMs have little device support” - right?
because for me it’s clear that companies just want to ship their own spyware and bloatware.
You do have a point. I wish projects like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS supported non pixel devices as well.
In many cases, because manufacturers refuse to allow unlocking of bootloaders. In other cases, because manufacturers refuse to share drivers for proprietary hardware.
It just feels like I don’t need custom ROMs anymore. Nowadays, most phones already do what I want them to do. I used to be pretty deep in the custom ROM community, but nowadays I don’t even think about rooting my phone.
I guess the only use case for custom ROMs is the privacy aspect. But most people don’t care about it, so the support is abysmal.
I am presently using a super niche device. SUPER niche. So niche that I have been dealing really closely with the manufacturer, who worked with Qualcomm and made a specific firmware just to get wifi calling working for me in Australia.
I have quizzed them so many times on why they won’t support rom development. You can unlock the bootloader, but the rom files are heavily encrypted. There’s no way to extract the boot IMG so we’re dead in our tracks.
The manufacturer basically say that they have to fight so hard to gain google certification that they won’t do a single thing to risk losing it.
They’ve been pretty generous with their warranty policies so probably another reason is they don’t want to risk anyone doing overclocking etc and then having to cover device repairs or replacement.
AGM G2 Guardian. It’s a pretty exclusive club mate. AGM gambled big and I don’t think it’s really payed off for them - they haven’t shifted enough units and their profit margin was super small.
I work outdoors and live a pretty weird life, I was super super excited to find a decent snapdragon in a ruggedized device like this. The long-range thermal is legit, battery life is insane and it feels like a super high quality thing to hold. They’ve had a few little teething problems - some issues with fingerprint sensor for a few people, some screen flickering issues for others. I’ve been pretty lucky so far and I believe they are switching things up in manufacturing now.
I used to install custom roms all the time back before knox on Samsung, now I cannot be bothered, usually something in the roms does not work among other bugs, it takes too long to keep up to date on rooting stuff etc, the support for roms is abysmal. I started to lose interest around the time banking apps started detecting root and not working, there were ways around it with magisk but it was complicated and could not find decent documentation on it.
It just became simpler to use what’s out of the box and the newer phones I started buying had very little in the way of custom roms to start with.
And that is the goal - make it such a pain in the ass to go with something that won’t track your every decision that we all give up because it is easier.
At least LineageOS with or without MicroG is fairly simple, with auto-updates in many cases. Once you get past Knox and install twrp, it’s easier.
GSI builds are generally easy, too, if it’s well maintained. I like Andy Yan’s ROMs.
It must be a long time since you ran a custom ROM. I use GrapheneOS and that is far from the case.
If the recent drama with the former lead dev of GrapheneOS is any indication, putting our trust in a singular entity in charge of custom ROMs is also risky.
Fortunately the lead dev is not the entire project and his tantrum won’t affect the stability of the project
Good to know that graphene OS is a good experience. I’m wondering how it is in practice. I just recently started thinking about leaving Google. I made a list of Google products I wanted to replace and frankly it’s overwhelming. One I really cannot live without is Maps. It’s just the damned best. And waze is owned by Google so afaik there is not much choice. Do you use the Google app sandbox thing on graphene?
Ps. Your username is terrifying.
I can definitely recommend GrapheneOS. Interestingly Google Maps actually runs fine without Google Play Services, but if you do need other Googly stuff then installing the Sandboxed Play Services is pretty trivial. Happy to answer any more questions about it if you want!
