Beware of the Custom ROMs - The Case of Officially Pushed Nuke Codes and More

[calvin1719]

I think I've used both of these briefly, but I didn't like either of them IIRC. These devs seem like stupid entitled kids, who should have their own words repeated back at them - you're getting into FOSS, and it doesn't pay. live with it or get out of the business. And that Arrow dev's cost management for hosting seems to be completely off. If you don't know how to minimize costs perhaps you shouldn't be the one in charge of the hosting, and then going around blaming your users.

 

[greenhorn]

I don't think custom roms have the maturity and stability for every day use nowadays. I recall in 2011 the third party roms for my galaxy spica and zte blade were better, more functional and almost as stable as the factory ones.

These days I tried to run official pixel experience on a poco m3 using an official build from their website and keeping it updated was a pain. Had to do a clean flash every time - ain't nobody got time for that. Finally the phone croaked in just a year. My wife's m3 running the factory miui was doing just fine. I gave up and nowadays I stick to factory miui debloated

 

[superczar]

You mean technical knowhow.

no, i meant bandwidth indeed

You could be the most experienced android developer on earth , a true expert on everything from the kernel to the entire library framework !

But if you actually have the requisite skills then the bigger question is how do you have so much free time to even eyeball all the code, let alone thoroughly review it.

I don't think custom roms have the maturity and stability for every day use nowadays. I recall in 2011 the third party roms for my galaxy spica and zte blade were better, more functional and almost as stable as the factory ones.

These days I tried to run official pixel experience on a poco m3 using an official build from their website and keeping it updated was a pain. Had to do a clean flash every time - ain't nobody got time for that. Finally the phone croaked in just a year. My wife's m3 running the factory miui was doing just fine. I gave up and nowadays I stick to factory miui debloated

Yeah, same here
The code base was a lot smaller at the start and options were limited- so a fair amount of genuine effort went into solving a relatively simpler problem

vs a far more expanded and fragmented codebase as well as models - not to mention shorter product lifecycles.
Something has gotta give!

Like you, I gave up on custom ROMs after burning a Samsung S3 to death (IIRC, many of the custom rom had an issue with segregating the EEPROM from the flash-> leading to way too many writes than the EEPROM was designed for and subsequent premature failure) The device had completed 13-14 months so OOW as well.

I have started using droid again after a long gap and the level of fragmentation even on the OEM firmwares is astounding for me vs say circa 2009 or even 2015.
Love it or hate it, custom ROMs are a relic from the past now.. for more reasons than one

 

[AMG]

I thought custom ROMs died in 2016

 

[greenhorn]

What exactly happened with XDA? How did telegram end up taking over the scene. I've had lousy experiences with telegram, but i guess mostly because the ways of working seem to be different. There are different groups, nobody knows which one has the legit build, automoderation is crazy ( I got a temp ban in a group for posting 5 consecutive messages "flooding") and most of the responses are just people repeating manual.

What made users shift from XDA to such an inferior medium

 

[nRiTeCh]

What exactly happened with XDA? How did telegram end up taking over the scene. I've had lousy experiences with telegram, but i guess mostly because the ways of working seem to be different. There are different groups, nobody knows which one has the legit build, automoderation is crazy ( I got a temp ban in a group for posting 5 consecutive messages "flooding") and most of the responses are just people repeating manual.

What made users shift from XDA to such an inferior medium

Live interactions made xda shift to TG permanently.
Xda is just for a dev/newbie introduction and after 3-4 posts/pages its all taken to TG for a live discussion/updates/debugging etc.

 

[mantheman]

If the dev was not changed, I made a boot animation for PPUI (I don't know if they are still using it) before ProjectElixir was launched. It's too bad they are doing the paywall thing and got greedy. I hope he learned from his mistake; this is why an open-source project can be good or evil. But there are many other good projects and I'm still using custom ROMs.

 

[ashish]

Most custom ROM users are also college kids.
So there you go

In that sense you will even say that pc modders are kids, car modders are kids and only grandpas use stock things even if those grandpas are in their mid 30s 40s.
Bandar kya jaane adrak ka swad

 

[nRiTeCh]

If the dev was not changed, I made a boot animation for PPUI (I don't know if they are still using it) before ProjectElixir was launched. It's too bad they are doing the paywall thing and got greedy. I hope he learned from his mistake; this is why an open-source project can be good or evil. But there are many other good projects and I'm still using custom ROMs.

I used to report whatever bugs I encountered and reported to their community and as a gesture of goodwill the dev offered me a free premium subscription for 6 months. Can say it was worth. But the greed was from the end users who simply refused to pay and rather crack the code and pirate openly.

Paid roms came into existence only recently like 4 yrs ago or so when users kept requesting features in exchange of nothing while costing the dev/maintainers their time and even money to buy/source some stuff/code etc.

People make a rom and person and people themselves kill it either out of greed or jealously!

There are many good roms out there & Pixel exp. been the most basic pure vanilla ones which can be safely patched by even a noob without worrying about issues. Simple and clean porting.

 

[mantheman]

Paid roms came into existence only recently like 4 yrs ago

I also understand the dev doing the sub, since it's their project (though I still find it greedy, but I have no problem with it since it's theirs.). And for users who pirate it, we all do

 

[nRiTeCh]

I also understand the dev doing the sub, since it's their project (though I still find it greedy, but I have no problem with it since it's theirs.). And for users who pirate it, we all do

Of course! Just that we pirate on enterprise levels and Microsoft doesn't get itched nor cares..

 

[rootyme]

You mean technical knowhow.

Definition 2:

 

[Heisen]

In that sense you will even say that pc modders are kids, car modders are kids

In my opinion, yes they are kids (unless it's their business), there comes a tipping point where the kid has to decide whether to stay kid and keep on doing these mods, or to step up and buy something reliable and fast from the factory and focus on other bigger things.

In case of PC modders, rather than modding the heck out of a system again and again, after a while when they have done all sorts of things, they should simply buy more expensive components and get best performance they need out of the box. Actually freeing their brain from this never ending tinkering, at this stage you only upgrade to top of line parts every few years, so your hobby is still alive but it's not eating all of your time, by doing the same thing over and over again.

Similarly in car modding, you start with something mediocre, you do the mods get the experience, and now what? You can keep buying these budget builds and make them faster by doing all sorts of mods, but then comes a upper segment car which beats your car with stock factory tune, locking you in, in your own segment. After you have done this tinkering you simply buy an expensive performance segment car and be done with it, now your brain is free to move to a bigger thing. You buy another performance car when the right time comes, but you don't mod now, because you have been there, done that.

What bigger things you might say, well there are plenty of things, it could be a another niche or mainstream hobby ready to be dominated by your brain or you could simply scale your existing thing and make it larger, for example providing a service of your expertise for money or for free, etc

Gist of the matter is you don't want to spend most of your life doing a same thing over and over, except your job, other than that you want to experience as many things as possible. Flashing a custom ROM over and over is definitely not one of them.

 

[rootyme]

What exactly happened with XDA? How did telegram end up taking over the scene. I've had lousy experiences with telegram, but i guess mostly because the ways of working seem to be different. There are different groups, nobody knows which one has the legit build, automoderation is crazy ( I got a temp ban in a group for posting 5 consecutive messages "flooding") and most of the responses are just people repeating manual.

What made users shift from XDA to such an inferior medium

Telegram is one of those Swiss army knief stuffs that gives you instant access to both the content as well as the community.

As to why it replaced XDA, I think it serves as a forum in the form of a live chat.

Instant response is a huge factor here. People just don't feel the need to jump through the hoops of multiple websites/forums when Telegram can help them with everything those forums can and more.

To know what build is legit, all you need to do is join the official Telegram channel of whatever ROM you intend to use.

Yeah temp bans are something to keep in mind. But again, people rarely make more than five different posts in one go. With Telegram, they expect users to edit their posts instead of posting a bunch of messages.

Gist of the matter is you don't want to spend most of your life doing a same thing over and over, except your job, other than that you want experience as many things as possible. Flashing a custom ROM over and over is definitely not one of them.

Nicely put. It's much better to get a device with multi-year official OS upgrades than waste time looking for the best ROM.

 

[TEUser2K1]

Aren't postmarketos.org and lineageos.org quite known in this space, so tend to be trustworthy ?

 

[calvin1719]

Lineage serves as base for most of these roms you see these days, arrow, elixir, some others also I can't recall the names of.

 

[ibose]

Aren't postmarketos.org and lineageos.org quite known in this space, so tend to be trustworthy ?

PostmarketOS is actually a Linux distribution for mobile devices. The device support is very limited and feature support is even more limited. LineageOS is again a successor to CyanogenMod, which was, in turn, based on Android.
Neither are custom ROMs as such.

 

[calvin1719]

In my opinion, yes they are kids (unless it's their business), there comes a tipping point where the kid has to decide whether to stay kid and keep on doing these mods, or to step up and buy something reliable and fast from the factory and focus on other bigger things.

In case of PC modders, rather than modding the heck out of a system again and again, after a while when they have done all sorts of things, they should simply buy more expensive components and get best performance they need out of the box. Actually freeing their brain from this never ending tinkering, at this stage you only upgrade to top of line parts every few years, so your hobby is still alive but it's not eating all of your time, by doing the same thing over and over again.

Similarly in car modding, you start with something mediocre, you do the mods get the experience, and now what? You can keep buying these budget builds and make them faster by doing all sorts of mods, but then comes a upper segment car which beats your car with stock factory tune, locking you in, in your own segment. After you have done this tinkering you simply buy an expensive performance segment car and be done with it, now your brain is free to move to a bigger thing. You buy another performance car when the right time comes, but you don't mod now, because you have been there, done that.

What bigger things you might say, well there are plenty of things, it could be a another niche or mainstream hobby ready to be dominated by your brain or you could simply scale your existing thing and make it larger, for example providing a service of your expertise for money or for free, etc

Gist of the matter is you don't want to spend most of your life doing a same thing over and over, except your job, other than that you want to experience as many things as possible. Flashing a custom ROM over and over is definitely not one of them.

I dunno what your understanding here is, but while it is not non existent, that kind of approach is far from universal.

I don't use custom roms as "modding". I use them to not have bloatware and shitty ui on my device.
I don't "mod" pcs, I build them so I know exactly which component is where and Im not taken for a ride by the cheap bad quality prebuild industry.

Not all tinkering with things is for the same reasons. BUT EVEN IF IT IS,

There are definitely people who mod android or pc builds or cars, and it's very much a good way to spend time if you're interested. Don't bring your boomer attitude of "looking at bigger things" here.

 

[ashish]

I dunno what your understanding here is, but while it is not non existent, that kind of approach is far from universal.

I don't use custom roms as "modding". I use them to not have bloatware and shitty ui on my device.
I don't "mod" pcs, I build them so I know exactly which component is where and Im not taken for a ride by the cheap bad quality prebuild industry.

Not all tinkering with things is for the same reasons. BUT EVEN IF IT IS,

There are definitely people who mod android or pc builds or cars, and it's very much a good way to spend time if you're interested. Don't bring your boomer attitude of "looking at bigger things" here.

Exactly! These are those uncle category people who prefers to use devices or any stuff as is and they dont know whats tinkering is nor they consider it as a hobby.
They don't understand nor will ever get the happiness of modding at least having the guts to try and risk something new even if the person fails.

In his plain terms only kids mod. So, I'm glad that all those innovations in IT, Automobile, Science, Medical etc. are actually done by kids and these uncles just sip a coffee in their couch while commenting and gasping only at failures while not applauding even the tiny success because they don't want to do even 0.1% of this as they don't have interested in this as its a timepass for them. Nor they have the attitude to uplift or push someone who wishes to try something new.

I wonder how kids of such people even survive in this world. They should be limited to wearing dhoti pyjama and do only farming in a 10x10 land.

 

[variablevector]

That website, lmao... If you got your phone wiped because you flashed that thing, you honestly kind of deserve it. Letting some random guy in India/Bangladesh/China not just execute custom code on my phone, but actually have access to the OS internals sounds hilariously dumb. It's all OSS, I'm sure, but unless you're reading every commit to their codebase, it obviously isn't remotely safe.

Someone managed to get the xz backdoor into the unstable versions of almost every major Linux distro, and only got caught because a Microsoft engineer noticed ssh was running slower than usual. Imagine how much more vulnerable a project like this is. In most cases, the only thing missing is an incentive to target this minority of users.