12mo ago

Why is installing a different OS/Custom Rom on phones a huge hassle?

Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
flash a recovery.img,
load into recovery mode (which, depending on the phone, might need extra work)
wipe some caches,
select new os/rom image,
pray it doesn't brick your phone.

You'd think someone would've learned a thing or two from the easy graphical installations linux and even windows have been offering since the late 2000s.

78 comments

Because if it was easy you wouldn't feel the need to buy a new one every few years.

purposefully. they dont want you messing with their device. its that simple.
- "Their"?
  
  Yes. In the minds of executives, we're paying to use their devices instead of purchasing it. They don't believe that we should have the right to do whatever we want with the device we purchased.
  
  ha, you werent under the impression you were buying a device, were ya?
  youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
  
  Yes, they think it's their device even after they sold it. The FTC really ought to be making it abundantly clear that they're wrong, but it's been regulatory-captured, so...

Fairphone makes it as easy as they can to install /e/OS or any other custom ROM, probably because they believe in selling the phone as the hardware itself, with you being able to choose your OS.
like it should be. like we are doing with PCs.
but a fairphone does come with a very uncompetitive price tag, trust me, i own one.
- Assuming price isn't an issue, would you recommend it? I've been looking into them for my next phone whenever this pixel decides to die.
  
  definetely, i've only owned xiaomi and huawei devices that were on the brink of not working at all sometimes. compared to that, my Fairphone 4 is pretty reliable.
  although the camera could be better, it's perfectly usable. take a look at my cat trying to figure out what a cordless drill is.
  
  i would call CPU performance "good enough" and GPU performance "kinda bad for the money". even though fortnite, star rail and genshin impact run at a stable 30fps on low settings at 100% resolution.
  and the battery lasts the day only if you're lucky.
  all in all, if has been my companion for one and a half years now and i don't regret spending full price on it. i imagine the Fairphobe 5 being even better, it supposedly performed very well in mkbhd's blind camera test.
  and don't get me started about the ability to repair this thing. i've had it disassembled down to the motherboard multiple times, there are no adhesives in there, like at all. the CPU has some kind of hard thermal pad.

The web-based installer for GrapheneOS is very easy to use. The catch is that it only works for Pixel phones (and only those that are still receiving updates).
https://grapheneos.org/install/web
- If you don't mind me polling your opinion: do you recommend Graphene for someone previously used to Cyanogen / Lineage? I recently upgraded to a Pixel 8 from quite an old handset and I'm not particularly fond of the stock ROM. Much has changed since the last time I had to think about this stuff! I primarily care about privacy, and use my cell for little more than phone calls, messaging, and its camera.
  
  Yes- I'd recommend Graphene to anyone who can live without Google Pay. I've only been using it for a month but everything has worked without issue and with the added benefit of "storage scopes" and Google Play sand-boxing.
- I decided to install Graphene before looking up the installation and was blown away by how easy it is. I'd been on stock android for years and was expecting a similar experience as OP describes. My very old custom ROM folder is filled with files with names like 'confirmedsafeblob' and 'bricksafe' that I don't even know what they are anymore but speak to some past misery. Then beep-boop done with the web installer.

It used to be easy... When people were actually making custom ROMs for everything and you could literally just plug the device into your PC and run a program to do everything. I don't think there is anything inherently in most phones stopping this; it's the lack of people developing custom stuff for every piece of hardware out there. Some phones do actively try and thwart custom ROMs, such as Samsung with their Knox bullshit, but most don't need to; nobody is hacking them in the first place.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
Phones by and large are seen as a locked system: you specifically choose to buy Android or iOS and stick with that.
There’s really no incentive for companies to make different OS installs easy. I’d say there’s plenty of reasons not to: do you really want to give the average user that much power to fuck up their phone? I assume there’s also some security implications if they made it too easy to fiddle with.
So yeah, it’s difficult because you’re fiddling with something that wasn’t meant to be an end-user thing in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they made phones much more open in terms of hardware and software, but the big guys aren’t going to do it.
- That doesn't really make sense. Every paragraph, except the 2nd, also applies to PCs, yet you can install a different OS.
  The reason is quite simple: more money from users.
  
  Well, PCs have been quite non changing compared to phones over the decades (not saying they don't change but way way less).
  Linux didn't become user friendly very quickly.
  
  PCs aren't phones -They have different expectations and histories.
  Would you ever consider buying individual parts, and building your own gaming phone?
  The end result is still the same: Less consumer power,.
- I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.
  
  I have been tweaking my phone ever since Nexus 3 age. And only recently settle in the default MIUI/HyperOS and that is only after unlocking and removing a bunch of bloats.
- Really? You don't hear users complaining about bloat, duplicate apps, phones that no longer get updates, or laggy UIs? My Redmi phone has good hardware and became so much better when I installed a different ROM on it.
  
  Yeah, xiaomi mi 9t with pixelos. Then Universal Android Debloater, disable all the telemetry (wish I could just use this thing without google, but thats a topic for another day), got a new case and battery. It literally feels like i just bought a new phone even though this thing will be 5 years old!
  
  Everyone around me uses iPhones and I hear no complaints. And the folks who buy Android tend to prefer Samsung here, which seems to get decent updates.
  I’d never even heard of Redmi, but Googling it, it appears to be the entry level line of Xiaomi. When you buy a budget phone from an already budget brand, I’m not surprised that the user experience out of the box isn’t that great.
- I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
  I'd say that happens mostly because they don't even know there are alternatives. Also, like machinin said earlier, bloat is a very common problem in Android phones, even high end stuff from big companies, Samsung being one of the worst offenders in that regard.
  The average user doesn't know the phone doesn't need half of that shit, so he just shrugs and carries on.
- In summary, the corporate bean counters don't want to give up control over your device. That's really all it boils down to. They're not doing anyone any favors, that's for sure. It's pure greed
- This story only makes sense on its own momentum.

I do remember reading somewhere that smartphones don't have a standardized bootloader like PCs do with BIOS and UEFI, and that it can vary between manufacturers and devices. Could be wrong about it. Also some manufacturers really don't want you to be able to install custom software, like Samdung in North America. If you buy a Samdung device in NA...even if it is carrier unlocked.. the bootloader will be impossible to unlock.
- Adding to the "no standard bootloader" point: you can't boot your typical smartphone from a DVD or USB stick like you do for a PC. The procedure to flash a new rom is probably meant only for recovery purposes by tech support, rather than the end user

Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
A few years ago, there were huge issues with reseller unlocking the bootloader to inject ads on the phones they sold, which forced many android phone manufacturers to add online verification with long wait time to prevent bulk unlock.
- That may be an excuse they used, but I doubt that was really their motivation.

GrapheneOS is a really easy process, hardest part is unlocking the bootloader (which isn't hard at all).
Rest of the process is just clicking 3* buttons on a website and you're done.
*Some buttons you have to click multiple times
- Well, I don't have a pixel phone and they're not officially sold in my country :/
- can confirm. the hardest part is getting a pixel phone

There are a lot of reasons here which are correct, but one huge Factor when I was working with custom roms was the fact that the actual underlying hardware driver and firmware were a black box. Generally speaking you would need to harvest the binary files that made things like the camera, gps, and/or touchscreen work. Sometimes it wasnt too hard if you were going from one android skin to another that used the same underlining operating system, but if you wanted to make serious changes, and the phone manufacturer wasn't great at sharing, it could take a very long time to figure out what data needed to be passed to the camera to make it turn on and be available to use. What got even worse is if you wanted to upgrade your android version (5 to 6 lets say), where android made serious changes under the hood, you ran the risk of having these blobs not even work with the system. They would expect something that android no longer passed or provided. Or they were using some deprecated API to make their function a accessable. It just became impossible to do without being able to recompile the binary only portions that weren't subject to the gpl. As android has gotten more security conscious it has made things even more complicated.

I can't answer your question, but is quite unfortunate. It really shortens the lifespan of many phones as they stop receiving OS and security updates after awhile (and in many cases, right away).
- I don't think most users care about that. I certainly use mine until they get slow and stop holding charge.
  People I work with tend to get a new one when their provider pokes them to get a new phone, since way too many people think a phone contract should cost £50 a month and that the phone is somehow "free".
  Google should push third parties to a default build of Android that Google maintain, rather than having to update and maintain their own. Imagine if you had to go to Dell or Lenovo or ASUS for your Windows updates? The current Android ecosystem is nonsense.

Because vendors realized they've made a mistake. They've lost control they can't regain. Same thing with game consoles.
So, it's actually a feature for the companies selling you phones.

For many reasonable vendors, this process is very unlikely to brick your phone, and requires minimal effort to unlock the bootloader or load/change the recovery.
However, many phone vendors (Xiaomi was the one example I know) subsidize phone price with data surveillance and ads; so they don't want users to use other OS, as it hurts their revenue.

GrapheneOS's guided installation is simple enough anyone should be able to install it IMO.
- Provided you must use a google device

Because Linus Torvalds decided to license Linux under only version 2 of the GPL back in the day (instead of the recommended "2 or any later version"), which means Linux's license can't be upgraded to version 3 and thus devices running Linux (including Android) will forever remain vulnerable to Tivoization.
- Thus once again proving that GPLv3 is the best license. At least he didn't use a corporate bootlicker license like MIT.
  
  We know exactly what would've happened if Linus had picked a permissive license instead of a copyleft one: it's called "BSD" and it's a lot less popular.
- linux couldn't be as big as today with gpl3

We all know the reason phone manufacturers don't let you easily switch off their software...This isn't a community for rhetorical venting.

Xiaomi becomes a pain in the ass with HyperOS. It's sad. The hardware was good and you could install custom roms.

Look up the history of how Android was developed, particularly what happened when Google took control, and you will find your answer. Ofc if you want to help, feel free to be the change that you want to see in the world, I'm only talking here about the past, as you asked about.
TLDR version of that history: greedy corporations surprised everyone, somehow, by ultimately acting in a greedy manner. B-b-but their slogan was "Don't be evil"! - once upon a time. And ofc Apple sure as hell wasn't going to cooperate with that "nonsense" of allowing anyone to take even one step outside of their walled garden. So what then is left to us, besides what you see before you?

Less tinfoil in my take: a good reason there doesn't exist other OSs is a lack of drivers and support for hardware. Good luck getting your screen to work if it's proprietary to the manufacturer and device. Can't communicate with the ASICs if they don't use standard protocols, etc.
This was a big issue back when I was involved in the LG G Flex 2 community and I can assume it only got worse since then.
PCs are a bit different IMO since generic drivers might get you pretty far. Even then, support for modern graphics cards (for example) would be near impossible without the manufacturers playing nice or in-depth insider knowledge

Very few people try to change their OS because it is difficult. If it was easy, more people would do it. Most people SHOULD NOT do that. Apple would have to triple their tech support staff just to keep up with the people who don't understand their new OS, or complain about regular features not working like they used to, and those are the ones that don't brick their phones while just poking around in some settings they don't understand.
They should ease off a little with allowing it, but pretty much only those who REALLY know what they are doing can't pull it off.
- That doesn't explain it, especially because they can very well say that the end user's warranty void if they uninstall the packed in OS

78 comments