Customizing Android

posted by admin on November 7, 2011

A few years ago when Android was released everybody was excited because it had something that Apple couldn’t give to its consumers i.e. file storage and access at will (you can argue that iTunes and now iCloud allow that but still not straight forward as dragging and dropping files through a USB) and this is was the USP for Android so developers and consumers who wished to customize their phone at will, embraced Android. Now this approach had its challenges – giving storage control to users made memory management a bit tricky – considerable lags were experienced and user experience (UX) took the biggest hit. This made the phones laggy and at some points unusable. Users would have to restart the phones often and if the users were not tech savvy (like developers) they could never identify the cause for the performance degradation be it because of too many installed apps (not to mention poorly coded ones) or too much tax on the memory, in any case the user would keep restarting the phone to a point were frustration paramounts. That’s when a normal user with a “smartphone” would switch to iPhone. Not because they care about it but only because the UX is great. They don’t have to worry about lags and constant reboots – sure it lacks a few features but what the heck, in the words of apple – “it just works”. I had to agree – As a user I would rather go for a phone that “just works” with a fewer features than something that had great features but doesn’t work so well.

Fortunately, there is a community of developers that care about this mobile OS , for one reason it’s open source and it gives manufacturers and developers the flexibility to modify the OS as you like. So these generous folks (yes, I’m referring to XDA developers) would tear open the OS and find the pain points, tweak them and release them as a custom build or in technical terms these are called custom ROM’s.

I bought a HTC Desire HD (DHD) last year. Excellent piece of hardware and it felt just right in my hand, had a big screen, very convenient for reading emails or browsing web. However, it had its pain points. It was great for the first 2 weeks when I had little or a few apps installed but as time went by, as usage increased, I experienced lags and automatic reboots (no! this is not a feature) and not to mention the battery was a huge drain. After another week to me it looked like a power hungry robot constantly looking for power outlets to feed upon.

When things go wrong, like everyone else, I googled. I then came across this custom ROM from Lee Droid, who, fortunately likes the hardware equally as I do and he was generous enough to release this custom ROM for HTC DHD called Lee Droid ROM. I hit the jackpot! it was just perfect! after flashing (i.e. english for reinstalling) my DHD with this ROM I could experience performance gains and the battery was holding on for much long time! It now lasted almost 36hrs on a single charge (compared to 10 earlier) with regular usage – calls, emails, browsing, some games and music. This certainly did fix my problem, but, there is a catch (there is always a catch) to it! – There are risks involved in flashing your phone with a custom ROM

1. You need to ROOT your phone. That is you need to unlock your phone in order to grant access to this custom program you are about you install. There is a tutorial here
2. If not done correctly according to instructions you might turn your phone into a brick! yes, totally unusable.
3. by flashing the phone you’ll be devoid of your warranty, guarantee if any
4. Since these are custom ROM’s there will be bugs hence there will be constant updates that you might have to apply. As these custom ROM’s are built in developers kitchen the quality testing will not be of the same scale as a commercial ROM (the one that comes with the phone)

There are many ROM’s that are cooked in many developers kitchens on a daily basis and some of these ROMs take their job very seriously, they even have nightly builds and stable releases

Some of the well-known ROMs are

• CynogenMod
• MIUI
• You can find a list of ROMS here by manufacturer and model

Later next year I got the “Google Phone” – Samsung Nexus S 3G running Gingerbread (also called Crespo) – Hoping that as the ROM is now built by El Goog itself it should be more stable and performing. Well, to be honest it was! rarely it would lag, automatic reboots became a thing of the past. However, the price for all the above was a plain vanilla phone, that looked similar to iOS and performed OK overall. Keyboard still sucked and the ergonomics were not that great – eventually it felt I paid too much for a piece of plastic (yes Samsung’s phones are all plastic) running an open source OS.

I revisited XDA again and I saw some decent improvements in the ROM sections someone even ported the latest version of Android 4.0 a.k.a Ice cream Sandwich here and there are a few promising ones here!