The death of the Custom Roms was inevitable

There was a time when customizing an Android mobile was popular, very popular. I remember the fervor of the Custom Roms, the movement that was in Spanish forums such as Htcmania In Roms sections, and how Xda Developers It was a bible for the pot.

Increasingly polished systems, obstacles by manufacturers so that users do not personalize the phone, and Middlek boom and its consequent incompatibilities with drivers have ended up making this paradise a whole moor.

The golden age of the pot. Talk about Custom Roms boom It is to go back 10 years ago, between 2010 and 2015. During this period, the community of developers and users willing to put hand to their device. We always talk about small numbers, at that time Cyanogenmod (the best known rom) exceeded one million users. Spectacular number for such a niche product, but minimal compared to the thousands of users that Android has.

The big names. There are several names that will put the hair from Punta to more than one regular at the Custom Roms. AOKP (Android Open Kang Project), Resurrection Remix, Paranoid Android, Carbonrom, Dirty Unicorns …

All of them had in common that they were based on “pure Android”, the Android AOSP code with its native visual lines. Each of them added different degrees of customization, some to brutal extremes.

Years later, with the launch of the Google Pixel, the Rom Pixel Experience was popular, I still have installed in me Little f3. This ROM carried the pixel system to phones with other systems, adding additional customization that even Google allowed.

Deaths begin. Little by little, most of these projects have died. AOKP died in 2018Resurrection Remix carries Without climbing anything to Sourgeforge from 2020, Dirty Unicorns turned off his servers in 2021last year We said goodbye to Pixel Experience.

Of the few survive are lineage (former Cyanogenmod), with quite updated ROMs and giving a second life to those phones that no longer have official support by the manufacturer.

And it makes sense. Changing ROM has, mainly, two advantages. The first is to enjoy the latest version of Android before the official manufacturer gives us, if it does. But, for a few years, this is no longer of interest. Android’s versions come with more and more discreet changes, and move from Android 13, to 14 or 15 does not involve draft changes.

More advantages. The second advantage is customization, something that manufacturers have been working for a while. There are terrible roms (we are not going to give names, it is known), but there are also manufacturers making very good quality software and with a magnificent support.

Third, the bookstores and APIs of the manufacturers have more and more weight: the cameras pay as pay thanks to the behavior of the NPU, native integration of AI … Elements of closed code to which we dispense if we work on a generic kernel. A perfect cocktail for a terrible outcome: the death of the Custom Roms.

In Xataka | I’ve been trying mobile for 10 years and this is the only customization layer that has managed to convince me