Is the Android custom ROM community dying? Seems like a lot of the major ROMs are dead...

Is the Android custom ROM community dying? Seems like a lot of the major ROMs are dead, with nothing really stepping in to fill their shoes except for a sea of mediocre Indian shit.

Hardware advances, point of diminishing returns, etc.

A clean wipe of any high end phone made in the last 3 years and a fresh battery will be good to go for another 3 years easily.

There's too many different cellphones. It's impossible to get a big enough community to collaborate on a proper operating system. The two smartphones I've owned in my life have only had unofficial ports of cyanogenmod and it turned my phone into garbage.

Maybe if they made a single OS with a repo of drivers instead of making a specific OS for each phone, it could work better.

My Nexus 5 was still performing great, only reason I sidegraded to this redmi 3 pro was because battery life.

If you have such a chink phone that you don't get official cyanogenmod you need to get a new phone

Feels like "custom ROM" just means "cyanogenmod" these days

Nobody uses anything else.

Retard. I only had Samsungs.

>samshit
The only retard here is you. Now kill yourself, you stupid fucking piece of shit.

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Other than Cyanogen, I feel that spark has died. I remember the days of HTC ROMs, the Virtuous guys in particular. I believe they cracked Sense framework and got a lot of stuff in working in it. Paranoid Android were definitely the best in actually creating new exciting features. I have a 6P right now and only spent like a month with a ROM and I've been using stock ever since.

i have never seen the point in custom ROMs.
i only ever wanted plain vanilla android.
the first thing i do when i root my phone is delete all apps that dont come with stock android
after that i install gravitybox and apex...wow now i created a whole new ROM minus OC abilities.

Paranoid android literally came back a month ago. They blew up the market again. I personally like Ressurection Remix, Exodus, OctOs, Dirty Unicorn, and several others that weren't around 3 years ago. So no, the market is the same, different names, but the same amount. Some phones can only be on the newest version of android thanks to a dedicated community.

My G3 is at the end of its "life cycle" despite hardware that is fine for today. I am sitting on the latest 6.0.1 nightly and expect to be on 7.0 within 2 months of it being out thanks to cyanogenmod. I do plan to upgrade one day, but a G3 has all the things a phone needs.

I digress, the market is there, just find a dev, support them with a beer on paypal here and there and show appreciation. Also GSM phones get more support all the time. Don't fucking go cheap, go flagship or don't expect root. Hell go HTC and you'll at least have root.

Because all custom rom ""features"" can now be done with Xposed. People just want some minimalist rom that doesn't come with a bunch of fucking useless bloat like XXXX_VIPER_XXXX audio and 1337_BOOT_ANIMATION.

There is CopperHeadOS, Replicant and CyanogenMod

What does GravityBox and Apex do?

what is google

apex:
just a typical launcher.
gravitybox: all the options that you find built into any custom rom

Nobody forced you to reply.

>Maybe if they made a single OS with a repo of drivers instead of making a specific OS for each phone, it could work better.

That's exactly how it works, just the drivers are usually proprietary and you're not allowed.

Cyanogenmod for example, all of those roms are generated from a single source repo (which itself comes from AOSP), and the build process overlays a specific set of drivers and configuration values for the particular phone you're building for.

So how does it work? Are the drivers provided with Cyanogenmod? does that make it illegal?

official cyanogenmod roms will only use drivers that are open source, I believe. Unofficial roms will make use of drivers extracted from the phones official rom, which would technically be illegal I think.

Really I don't know how the drivers are sourced or the legality, I only know that stuff because I've tried building cyanogenmod myself.

>Slim is dead

But Xposed is garbage.

I've never used Xposed. Why is it garbage?

>my phone is good out of the box

guess what phone i have

Really I think the big reason to use a custom ROM now is to de-Google the phone for privacy reasons.

lumia 530

Indeed, Xposed is trash.

The reason most of the custom ROMs have died is because they were maintained by 1 or 2 people, and those people were immediately hired for high paying jobs somewhere so they abandoned they ROM project.

It's also a lot of work to maintain a custom ROM when Jewggle is consistently fucking with Android so much it's impossible to keep up. The fragmented user base is also an issue, as is actually finding devices you can still flash. With SELinux and various boot secure keys it's harder and harder to root phones so people are giving up on the scene.

tl;dr proprietary junk is getting too complex/hard to reverse or root

tl;dr2 the people who originally did this were all hired off and forced to sign contracts to kill their projects

tl;dr3 the whole scene will be dead soon as CPUs are being designed so that only signed code can run on them meaning your hacked together freeDroid shit will no longer even be recognized by the CPU.

Xposed is trash but it's enough for most people who'd otherwise be installing xXSlim_HackerXXRC_5 [BETA][Bugs u tell me ;)]

Do custom roms really even offer anything worthwhile over stock android anymore? It seems like Android picked up all the useful features already.

There's MIUI as well.

I know that my Alcatel Onetouch Pixi 3 (4") has a FIUI (modified MIUI according to the author of the ROM) ROM made. Other than that,CM11 does great for me. Would have went with CM12 because Lollipop but apparently gapps gives Error 7 in TWRP for no reason. I will try and look more into that.

Either a Lumia or a iPhone,or a Nexus.

Why do you find it garbage? I only use it for remapping buttons and other small shit. One thing I miss but it could never do again was finer volume control, you have to decompile and do it yourself.

It's back baby, just released alpha builds

It used to be that there were certain patches that the LTS version of Linux Android was using for some version was horribly outdated and missing patches for simple things that would make it better like performance fixes, which was probably the driving factor for the roms.

Nowadays, since Linux and Android has taken steps to having source coherency where Android manufacturers will need to change less kernel code and custom modifications from stock kernels to run, these roms no longer have much reason to exist.

I'm not sure, but it bites. It sucks that Cyanogenmod is the only option for my S3, I'd love to be able to try other ROMs without going with some outdated crap with security vulnerabilities.

The only feature I would consider worth it to go custom Rom is tap the screen to wake up the device.

I don't know why not every manufacturer had the double tap to wake feature as a default option.

Android is still using an extremely out of date kernel, even for Jewggle's showcase devices they are currently touting.

My recommendation for everybody is just build your own ROM. Buy a Nexus, then you can just git clone Jewggle's source code for the device and customize it yourself.

You can do this for Motorola too and other devices but they are never kept up to date unlike Nexus branded devices. Buy an old nexus phone to try this don't use your current device. That's the only hobbyist kind of mobile hacking I do lately otherwise my regular phone is straight google mainline and they do all my updates, I can't be arsed.

I mean, they are technically faster than Debian but less so than more common variants of Linux like Ubuntu and Fedora on kernel updates.

What was really horrid was the fact that stuff like compcache and various easy IPC and memory improvements was missing during the 2.x era because Google chose wrongly the kernel version to use when LTS branches didn't exist and the hardware running Android was not great given how horrid the OS ran back then. This was partially fixed in 3.x before being completely rectified by the 4.x era.

There's that and then there were also some stuff like some manufacturers' phones having ICS 4.x being based off a 2.6 kernel even though the official release of ICS used a 3.x kernel and so on.

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