Rooting and Custom ROMs Made Android Fun, but I’m Glad It’s in the Past
For Android lovers, rooting and personalized ROMs were once the ultimate draw. They made Android exciting and transformed each phone into a project that is worth tinkering. But the golden age of the Modding scene has passed for a long time, and it is probably a good thing.
A brief history of ROMs and roots
Personalized ROMs and roots have been part of the Android experience for almost the first day. The T-Mobile G1 was rooted in the few weeks after its launch, and from that moment, experimenting the phones has become something that all enthusiasts had to do. It was also a key differentiation point that helped sell the platform.
While iPhone users had the possibility of jailbreaking their devices to install a handful of applications that Apple did not approve, Android users could completely erase their software and customize their devices from zero.
Whatever you want your phone to be, you can find it in Roma like Cyanogenmod, Paranoid Android and Modaco. Minimalist or full of functions, speed or battery, or a whole new user experience: a quick trip to the XDA forums would reveal the perfect ROM for you.
My own ROM trip started with my first Android phone, HTC Desire. After HTC spent months not to provide information on an update of Android 2.3, I decided to know which options the community had already created. And so, I flashed my first roma of gingerbread. I remember that it was a bit of a hotchpotch. The camera was also likely to restart the phone than to take a photo, but it was almost part of the pleasure.
After that, I moved to the Galaxy S3 and replaced the Toudy Touctwiz software from Samsung by various Roms in stock. Then, I went to the Nexus phones and I needed Rom less, so I explored the advantages of rooting instead. I loved the Xposed frame with the almost endless customizations of the Gravitybox application and the Greenify of the battery economy. Its replacement, the magisk almost as good, was just as addictive.
Finally, this also fell on the edge of the road. My banking applications stopped working if there was a sign of root software on my phone, so I had to make a choice. My last two phones have not been told, and I will not come back.
The golden age of rooting has disappeared
Roma and personalized roots were, to some extent, their time. Android was a new platform, adopted by enthusiastic users. And although there is still a small community around him, the peak has been happening for a long time, and probably for a good reason.
These are not only the drawbacks that we have with pleasure. Safety, compatibility and performance implications, brick devices and how it could be a time well with a minimum advantage. Or a large part of the community has evolved. Roma has briefly threatened to pass the dominant current when OnePlus bought Cyanogenmod, but ended up simply showing how vulnerable community projects can really be.
Or even that it is much more difficult to do now than most devices are locked in tighter than they have ever been.
The truth is that modding is no longer necessary. The most practical advantage of installing a personalized ROM has been to save your phone from obsolescence. But you can now expect three or four years of updates for a mid -range phone and seven for a flagship product, which is unlikely to be a problem. Many phones have update policies that will survive the device itself.
Android, and the personalized versions of manufacturers, also improved beyond the measure. The days of ugly graphics and skeuomorphic designs of Samsung and others have long been over, replaced by clean and modern interfaces. Bloatware – Unknown preinstalled applications – can always be a problem on certain devices. However, some people love it, and you don’t need to root it to delete it anyway.
One thing that allowed me to root my phones for a long time is the possibility of adding new features. No big things Gimmicky, but small useful functions that should have been part of the software in the first place. Things like being able to resize widgets, obtain more useful volume controls or mapping buttons with specific tasks. Most of them have now been checked because Android has become more and more polite.
Commercial control against convenience
The Modding scene was an important part of Android’s story, and the opening of the platform was the reason why many of us chose it above the iPhone. Its decline undoubtedly means that we have lost a lot of control over how we can use our devices. And with other limits on things such as the touch of touch on the horizon, the Android world is very different from the way it was in its first decade.
But I can’t feel too bad about it. The Roma and the roots had their day, and Android, and without a doubt, many of its users have exceeded it. Smartphones have become highly merchant. Where the first Android phones were difficult and ready and invited to tinker, these are now only tools that work exactly as expected. And it must be a good thing.
