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

[rootyme]

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.

Agree with your point that custom ROMs are generally flashed to get rid of the bloat. That and and the latest security patches are the prime reasons in my opinion.

At the same time, I think he is pointing at what you would call "custom ROM hopping". In desktop Linux, some people just keep trying distros one after the other in their quest for the perfect one. And it kind of leads to a burn out in some cases while also resulting in wastage of time.

In my experience, all Android ROMs don't necessarily have the same kind of optimization or stablity. And many times they need a clean flash for a simple incremental update. This is also an important factor to keep in mind.

All points considered, while the availability of custom ROMs is a bonus, it's doesn't hurt to have the OEM officially supporting it for multiple years.

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 depends I guess. For many devices, Indians/Bangladeshi are official maintainers for LineageOS.

 

[superczar]

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

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….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.

oh boy!
Not sure why you made it a personal attack not just on the poster but even brough the kids into the fold..sigh!

In any case, I think @Heisen has pretty much summed it up in his post but just to add a bit more color:
Most of the uncle category folks who have posted here have been flashing phones (as well as a much wider set of devices) for more than two, maybe even 3 decades now -
sometimes by soldering a JTAG -serial for the purpose of gaining access..or soldering a custom bootloader on the device motherboard…or even compiling their own code and custom code modifications.

So yeah, most of these uncles/boomers look at these custom ROMs with some degree of disdain - NOT because they can’t flash them- but because it is no longer interesting/challenging enough , offers a poor ROI/nothing that’s really new…and has become largely dummified over the years

The first custom phone rom i had installed was to convert a Siemens SL45 (feature-phone) to a SL45i (quite possibly the first true smart phone- do look it up)
The first iPhone I had modded was in almost all likelihood, the first iPhone ever activated on India GSM networks.

Hell, A personal long term modding project of mine was in fact a featured article on hackaday fairly recently

But for some reason, I suspect many of the self proclaimed modders here have probably never even held a soldering iron or used an oscilloscope (except maybe, just maybe in their college lab)

So If you really want to taste the so called adrak you refer to , I would definitely suggest going beyond just downloading a set of pre-built binaries from telegram and hitting a big "FLASH ME" button... ( I truly hope that’s not the case here!)

But, hey if you think that a script-kiddie style one click code upload is what makes one a modder then by all means, you are a modder
and if doing the same thing over & over again is your definition of tinkering and joy.. then what do i say man.. You do You !

 

[jayanttyagi]

I have used arrow os on my poco f1 for a long time. Never heard of this ****head story.

 

[Heisen]

I don't use custom roms as "modding". I use them to not have bloatware and shitty ui on my device

Then why don't you buy something which doesn't have this problem in the first place. Why buy something shitty just to fix it up? Makes you wonder.

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.

I was heavily into modding both rooting and jailbreak back in 2012, done all of that, got all the happiness that I needed. Maybe you have not reached that point yet, where you just want the thing to work out of the box with as little custom input as possible, after all it is a smart 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.

So you do know the difference between modding and building, I was talking specifically about modding, which includes overclocking, water cooling, installing absurd amount of fans etc.

Not all tinkering with things is for the same reasons.

Yes, yes it should be.

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.

Yes there are, but going forward is the important thing IMO, for example you simply can't be flashing ROMs whenever new one is available, in this scenario if you are actually have real love or passion for the thing, you would look into writing your own custom rom, and this would be the next big thing in this category.

If you are just flashing, you are stuck in endless loop.

Don't bring your boomer attitude of "looking at bigger things" here.

So is this not a boomer friendly forum?

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.

Perhaps this uncle has done a lot of tinkering in the past and came to conclusion that multiple goal oriented devices perform much better than making a single device do all the things reliably with tinkering.

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.

Only thing I can say is, by all means do the modding, but don't forget to look beyond it.

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

All those innovations happened because someone somewhere was doing something which was not done before (they were doing the next big thing), you can't exactly call that modding, it's more like experiment/research. I wonder in terms of innovation what can you innovate by modding your phone or PC at home which has already been done by countless people.

and these uncles just sip a coffee in their couch while commenting and gasping only at failures while not applauding even the tiny success

Flashing a custom rom, or adding extra 2-3 fans your PC build would be a success in kid's life, because he has never done it before, but for some who is doing it over and over again with no path to grow is a problem.

Nor they have the attitude to uplift or push someone who wishes to try something new.

Wrong, I do wish them to try something new, a.k.a the next big thing.

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.

Invalid statement, nothing in my rambling's correlates with that, it's actually the opposite, if you read it carefully.

 

[altair21]

So the unsuspecting user downloading ROMs from their site is called "****head" by the maintainers/devs themselves.

Whatever the case is, they have no right to be this cheap. No elaboration is needed from my end here, I guess. I've never used this ROM thankfully.

Blocking Ads on their site also makes you a, you guessed it.........

Anyways, have you used either of these ROMs? I have not and will never.

btw, never responded to this but I get the frustration of the second guy, hosting is expensive af and if you are not using a CDN or whatever for your content and are simply serving it from your server then yeah you are gonna get hammered like crazy, most of the devs atleast in the old days have used their own money to fund this and it gets frustrating seeing users abuse/demand shit like this. heck, in my own family, peeps get on my nerves when they push me to fix my jellyfin server asap, so I am sympathetic to him

At the same time, I think he is pointing at what you would call "custom ROM hopping". In desktop Linux, some people just keep trying distros one after the other in their quest for the perfect one. And it kind of leads to a burn out in some cases while also resulting in wastage of time.

Anyone who's distro hopping knows its a waste of time, we just do it for funsies

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 ****ed up my partition tables on my zenfone lol, big lesson learned then, never screw around without a proper recovery partition, even ADB gave up on me that time

 

[raksrules]

@ashish You seem to be a young boy who probably thinks attacking people due to age is cool and you would be staying ageless.
Please understand that people you see here who joined back in 2005-2010 era, we all used to do this custom rom thing. It is nothing new and although i have given up long on custom roms, I am sure flashing them is far easier than what we have done.

Also understand that many of these so called uncles have different priorities now. Our life doesn't resolve around insta Reels and such..we have full time day jobs and family to take care. So many don't feel this rom thing is worth it anymore.

May be you are naive right now but time will make you understand.

 

[rootyme]

@ashish You seem to be a young boy who probably thinks attacking people due to age is cool and you would be staying ageless.

Just saying, he has been on TE since its inception (April, 2005).

btw, never responded to this but I get the frustration of the second guy, hosting is expensive af and if you are not using a CDN or whatever for your content and are simply serving it from your server then yeah you are gonna get hammered like crazy, most of the devs atleast in the old days have used their own money to fund this and it gets frustrating seeing users abuse/demand shit like this. heck, in my own family, peeps get on my nerves when they push me to fix my jellyfin server asap, so I am sympathetic to him

No excuse, again. Because -

1. Most people flashing this ROM never read that blog. They are blissfully unaware of the attitude of their ROM devs. Proof is just right above.

I have used arrow os on my poco f1 for a long time. Never heard of this ****head story.

Here you go.

2. Not everybody has high speed stable connection, regardless of how far we have come. The majority userbase here are real kids/teens who have a FUP limit since mobile data is all they have in the name of internet. Many of them will use Download Managers simply because they can't afford to download the entire thing at one go. Browsers are not reliable for multi-day downloads.

3. If they really are frustrated, they should be showing big banners/pop-ups on every page of their site reminding users to not use download managers.

4. Finally, they can block multi-threaded downloading from server side.

Again, their behaviour is inexcusable. It's not like they are the first project to face such issues. There are definitely solutions for this problem.

If nothing works, they can either dump the project or stamp this word "****head" on their homepage and downloads page so that people never hammer their servers with connections and completely avoid this ROM. No userbase, no load!

 

[enginear]

OMG! this thread is just going elsewhere. We were at roms, then piracy and now uncle aunts' kids wtf!
What's next? Is someone going to drag govt. into this, and govt. will come up with some desi roms across platform where the phones boot logo will be Vande Bharat and shutdown animation as jai modi.

 

[TEUser2K1]

@enginear
The mobile OS you are talking about is BharOS, it does have the propensity.

 

[gokul.ece22]

Im still using my poco f1 as my primary device only due to the availability abundant custom roms.

i choose my devices, such that it has an active rom development community.
my devices were redmi 1s, redmi note 3, note 4, note 5 pro, note 7, realme 3 pro, poco f1
never encountered any mishaps in the custom rom journey.

my opinion:
customs roms actually extend the usage/performance of devices little bit further and avoid the devices being end up as e-waste prematurely.

 

[enginear]

@enginear
The mobile OS you are talking about is this, it does have the propensity.

I know but it's a closed os and just limited to the govt. environment. They should make a release ver. for all popular phones.

 

[becool773]

Anyone using divest or graphene os in their phones?

 

[DigitalDude]

This is why I always used to stick with just lineage like a lizard... and stopped using custom roms for my main phone. It is just old phones that is just used as an audio player etc.