Custom Android ROM Developers Get OTA Update Capabilities Like Carriers

hypnosec writes "A new service dubbed OTA Update Center has been launched that enables Android ROM developers to provide over-the-air (OTA) updates of their ROMs in a centralized and easy fashion. Custom ROM developers had very little at their disposal when it came to providing updates and when any user with such a ROM did want to apply an update, he/she was required to reinstall the new ROM from scratch, which often involved deletion of the backup, installation of the new ROM, and restoration of data. This was a lengthy process and often a deterrent when it came to updating the ROM. Also, the developers were required to have their own infrastructure whereby they would be required to host their own servers and have the required bandwidth to serve scores of downloads. The OTA Update Center changes this and provides a free-to-use service that is easy and noob-friendly to use."

Comments

Goo Anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Goo.im does the same thing, it seems to work fine and have lots of standard roms in it.

noon-friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

they are having a problem with that time slot?

Re:noon-friendly

[Megahard]

That means you can do an update with one hand while holding your lunch in the other.

ClockworkdMod

[ep0niks]

Same thing as ClockworkdMod Developer, http://developer.clockworkmod.com/ Register, upload your ROM, hosted and pushed via ROM Manager on devices..

Re:ClockworkdMod

[Alex Zepeda]

Yeah, except CWM is closed source, ad laden crapware with a penchant for bricking some phones.

Re:ClockworkdMod

[Anonymous Coward]

CWM (recovery) is great. The ROM Manager application is the ass-sucking part.

Incremental updates?

[ahow628]

I would be highly interested if I could download incremental updates (patches?). Who wants to download 70-600mb of data for every nightly?

Re:Incremental updates?

[hey_popey]

How exactly do you manage to do that? I change update CM9 nightlies with CWM. No wipe is needed at all. Not a single app login is lost during the process! The only thing I need to setup again is the avast anti theft service.

Deletion of backup?

[leromarinvit]

Delete your backups before any major change that might go wrong - it's just too boring otherwise!

Great...

[DNS-and-BIND]

ROM developers are among the worst at documenting how to install their ROMs. The guides - and I've read a bunch - all assume the user is a fellow developer. They read like notes an experienced man wrote to himself so he doesn't forget how to do something. Consider yourself lucky if the author uses capitalization and smooth sentences instead of "textspeak" and run-on sentences. You'll get gems like "Please make sure that gfree_verify returns secu_flag = 0 before following this steps!!!" without bothering to explain what gfree_verify or secu_flag mean, nor how to ensure that the value is 0. Then there are head-scratchers like "If you main software version is higher than the version of the PC10IMG you want to install (in this case 1.19.531.1) you have to change the main version number in the misc partition." Again, assuming the user is an expert just like the writer. Any over-the-air updates would be welcome. My favorite advice from ROM developer: "make sure you are to flash the proper stuff or you will have a brick"

Re:Great...

[wolrahnaes]

You need to look at better ROMs and ignore the crap.

What I've observed from having a few Android devices over the last few years is that in general stock-based ROMs are garbage. Each device typically has one or two developers who actually care about making a clean, functional ROM while sticking to the OEM-provided software where possible for stability reasons. Fresh is a good example of this on the HTC side of things. Unfortunately the vast majority of stock-based ROMs are made by kids who think l33tsp34k is cool and that everyone will love their abortion of a theme. You can usually tell these apart by how much their XDA threads look like Geocities or Myspace pages, full of animated GIFs and eye-raping colors. The "developers" usually don't take well to criticism, particularly if it's about their terrible visual choices, and XDA unfortunately encourages these idiots.

AOSP ROMs such as CyanogenMod tend to be a million times better. Don't confuse this with "kang" versions thrown together by someone who is usually about one step above the aforementioned eye rapists, I'm talking about official builds and unofficial releases from people who actually work on the project. AOKP would be another similar large AOSP-based project I'd put on the same level. Their documentation tends to be terse but clear and the people working on the project generally aren't three year olds.

MIUI is another AOSP fork worth mentioning on its own due to how far they've taken the UI. It's AOSP (I think derived from CM) at its core, but it's almost like a carrier skin on top, just not shitty and designed to work on many devices and keep up with AOSP in a reasonable timeframe. This started as some bored people translating a Chinese ROM that was a blatant iOS knockoff, but has morphed in to a much larger project.

Re:Is it ROM or not-ROM?

[muffen]

This might help: http://simply-android.wikia.com/wiki/Dictionary

Re:Is it ROM or not-ROM?

[somersault]

Uh.. not really. It's more just a word left over from when ROM actually was ROM. It originally was a part of the Operating System that was held on a read-only chip. Even when devices' "ROM" started to become updatable, we still call it ROM, because we're silly like that.