Android Custom ROM's

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Being relatively new to Android one of the immediately attractive things was the ability to install custom ROM's. After doing this ALOT I've learnt a couple of things.

It's pretty much impossible to brick an android phone if you understand some basic principles and processes. Once you get your head around what flashing a ROM means and what's involved you're pretty safe (read, not ENTIRELY safe). Whether or not you intend to install Cyanogen(mod) I'd recommend the Cyanogen(mod) Wiki as a good place to start. It's got all the info that you'll need to root your device and get you ready for flashing and it also lays out the steps and what they do. They list Engineering HBoot as "optional" but it saved my ass when all was nearly lost so I'd recommend it.

Android ROM's are really poorly distributed and hard to find. A couple of the larger ROM's have dedicated websites (Cyanogen(mod), LeeDroid, Revolution, MIUI) but the vast majority are distributed via the XDA Developers Forums which is annoying and time consuming. The up side is that it's a great source of information for just about everything.

After months of trial and error I've come to the conclusion that Cyanogen(mod) is the biggest and most popular custom Android ROM for a reason, it's the best. A lot of ROM's are just unpacked and repackaged versions of original manufacturer sources. Cyanogen actually reverse engineer the devices and have updates available before the manufacturers, pretty impressive stuff.

I'm loving my new Android phone and plan on documenting more of the journey here soon.