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Ask Slashdot: Are Custom Android ROMs Still a Thing?
Thelasko writes: Reading Kashmir Hill's series Goodby Big Five on Gizmodo made me consider switching to a custom Android ROM like LineageOS again. The Gizmodo articles make it seem that most phones are so locked down it is almost impossible to do. My last experience with custom ROMs confirmed that to be true for me. Is anyone having success? Why is LineageOS making builds for 185 devices if no one can use them?
"Why is LineageOS making builds for 185 devices if no one can use them" = you have yet to prove that nobody can use them, only that you cannot.
Just because you (the average consumer) can't use it on a phone you got from $carrier, doesn't mean that others can't put it to use.
That's not meant to be an insult, by the way... unlocked phones (that are truly unlocked, not just 'unlocked' to allow a different carrier w/ the same tech) can be loaded with the ROM and taken to town.
PS: If you're gonna talk about it, then be kind and provide a link to LineageOS, mm'kay? :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Locked bootloaders killed the custom Android OS on many different phones.
I run it on my One Plus & Samsung tablet. I will not buy a device that doesn't let me root it & run Lineage. It also enables me to run adaway & block trackers and other stupid parts of the android ecosystem which I do not like. I may eventually move to Purism & LibreOS though. Privacy respecting technology is unfortunately not mainstream, but it matters to some of us.
Be Excellent To Each Other
It's not impossible. It just requires doing your research before you buy. There are two things you need to look for.
1. Unlockable Bootloader
This is challenging because many OEMs will require you to go through a bunch of steps intended to make doing so as difficult as possible (beyond what is needed for data security.) There have been instances of OEMs just outright lying when it comes to bootloader unlockability. And of course, even phones that are to be unlockable have that disabled from some carriers. (Verizon, especially. Even Pixel devices can't easily have their bootloaders unlocked when purchased through Verizon.)
2. Community Support
LineageOS and xda-developers are good place to start. Popular flagship phones are more likely to have good community support around them if they're unlockable. Of course, you can always try to build AOSP for your own device, but community support will still be invaluable as most OEMs play pretty fast and loose with releasing their GPL code. (It's often difficult to get a fully working AOSP build with that the OEM gives you.)
I bought the midrange Moto X4 last fall when my Nexus 5X died. Motorola's website allowed me to unlock the bootloader (with the caveat that this voided the warranty). After that, I have installed different variants of Pie roms. I found Lineage 16 to be OK but my on-screen buttons would disappear, especially when I switched users. I now enjoy the PixelExperience Pie rom which gives me a lot of flexibility with settings like dark mode which are coming to regular Android but are not there yet. I also was able to find some great Magisk (rooted) modules, including one that significantly improves the sound of my cheap bluetooth audio headset. I even used root mode to use my microsd card as adoptable storage which is not enabled by Motorola.
So, yes, Android roms are alive and well, despite what some "expert" at Gizmodo says. xda-developers website has a plethora of information.
Many phones can be rooted still.
One of the places to look is the XDA Developers website https://www.xda-developers.com/root/
I got the email a few days ago from Google telling me how Google+ is shutting down (already knew this, of course) so I logged in to my account. Haven't been there in probably 2-3 years. My "communities" are almost all custom Android ROM groups or other Android software. Even a ROM like LiquidSmooth has effectively died. They announced in early '16 that all development had stopped ("devs are too busy or moved on to other things") but some re-start occurred in late '17 but little indication if it went anywhere.
I'm not trying to be American-centric but with Verizon and ATT being the pre-dominant carriers in the US and if I'm not mistaken, locking down their devices, it really hurt custom ROMs for many. I used to have Samsung Galaxy phones and after they locked them down, that was it for me.... If you had any hope of a custom ROM, you had to have the latest and greatest model because support for older ones was pretty much non-existent. I think someone or some group gained bootloader access but it wasn't back-portable nor were they interested in working on it. I remember lots of "bounties" offered too.
Still appears to be activity with TWRP and XPOSED Framework.
Newer Motos are locked unfortunately. If you contact Motorola for an unlock code, they'll give it to you and then void your warranty in their system.
Just don't go Verizon, AT&T, TracPhone, etc. Those bastards don't let you unlock your own hardware even when the hardware manufacturer allows it. Fuck them. I will never pay for service from them for that reason alone.
They're required by law to SIM/carrier unlock the device upon request, provided you own it.
Bootloader unlocking? None of the people at Verizon, ATT, etc. know how to do that, even if the manufacturer allows it on a stock device.
Verizon, ATT, etc. farm out their "customization" (bloatware and spyware) to China and locked down firmware and bootloaders come as part of the deal. Unless you're a three letter agency, you'll never get Verizon, ATT, etc. to contact and try to communicate with the people in China who worked on that shit a year or more ago and forgot everything.
Newer Motos are locked unfortunately. If you contact Motorola for an unlock code, they'll give it to you and then void your warranty in their system.
That's going to last right up until someone bothers to sue them over it. At least here in the USA, that's illegal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember playing with custom ROMs like Cyanogen, years ago, with my Samsung Galaxy phone on Sprint's network. Even back then, it created a lot of headaches for me. Nothing insurmountable, ultimately, but it wreaked havoc with things like Sprint's "visual voicemail" on the phone until some special patch came out to fix it, and there were bugs for a while where the phone would stop ringing on incoming calls.
After that, I swore off the custom ROM hacks, because I needed my cellphone for work as well as for just personal calls and entertainment. It's not worth having some cool new features and custom UI if it means I miss a few important client calls or the phone gets unstable when I'm counting on it.
(I wound up pretty much moving myself to the iPhone as I got more invested in the whole Apple ecosystem, and except for the stupid high cost of the latest XS series phones, I haven't regretted that a bit. If Apple doesn't start offering more bang for the buck by the time I'm ready to upgrade phones again, I *might* switch back to an Android. All depends on what the landscape looks like then, I guess. I'm good for another couple of years, I think.)
But I did have to tinker with the low-cost Androids again, trying to find my teenager a phone to use on a budget. I'm really disappointed in those options. Went with a Motorola E4 as seemingly the best of a bad bunch of cheap ones. At least it has the fingerprint reader on it and more RAM than most. Unfortunately, I couldn't put it on her "SimpleMobile" plan like I wanted to (they use T-Mobile's network), as it was carrier locked to Verizon. People told me, when I bought it, that "That's no big deal! Just pay a few bucks for an unlock code off the Internet and you're good to go!" Well, I'm finding out now that nobody does unlock codes for these anymore. All you get are some shady foreign people who want you to give them TeamViewer access to your Windows PC with the phone attached to it, to unlock it for you for a price. I've paid 3 different people now and not one has actually tried to remote in and do the job. Starting to wonder if it's all just a big scam?
In some ways we're now entering a golden age for Android roms, with the advent of Project Treble.
All phones shipping with Android 8.0+ are required to support Treble's platform abstraction layer, making life dramatically easier for custom rom bakers, going forward. Older phones benefit too; once their idiosyncratic hardware support is adapted to Treble, they can also expect easier and more stable updates. Generic System Images (GSIs) are now the norm, and will more or less run on any compatible platform.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
In the United States, it's damn hard to find a phone that can be unlocked, *and* can be used with Verizon. Verizon has their own custom phone/frequencies, unfortunately.
If you are on T-Mobile or AT&T, things are better, but it's still hard to find good custom ROMs for most phones that anybody wants.
But...custom ROMs aren't as useful as they used to be. Android has gotten a lot better, privacy-wise, and there are a variety of VPN-based ad-blocker/firewall apps. You can do just about everything you would've previously needed "root" for with something like AdGuard, and the default privacy controls in newer versions of Android.
What is this USA of which you speak? Because of how you describe it, I know it's not related to the SOTU tonight.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
My laptop has an unlocked bootloader and Netflix works just fine.
It's about privacy. If you're fine with Google knowing everything there is to know about you, then you're right, there's probably no chance. Call me nuts, but I don't want to give Google (or Apple) all of the details of my life.
I don't respond to AC's.
My Nexus 5X recently died - just rebooted in the middle of using it and it didn't come back up, just got stuck in a boot loop. My dad had the exact same thing happen to his phone (also a 5X) a couple months back; I went through the usual process to try to fix it and discovered that there's a fix that basically involved an unofficial ROM, along with an effort to try to get fix legitimised by Google by signing the relevant files.
It seems that the 5X is just busted by design as many many users had this problem. I haven't been able to get mine to boot far enough to try the fix (seems it's better as a immunisation method).
I was a bit nervous about putting random software I downloaded from the Internet on at such a low level, although it's all open source and seems to be highly recommended by XDA at least.
But when this sort of customisation is the only way to keep your phone alive when it dies hard after only two years - you'd better believe they're still a thing. Here's to the hacker types that keep our devices alive.