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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried rooting and re-imaging an android phone with a custom rom? I'm an experienced software engineer and it took me a painful while to make it happen. I supposed they could make it easier, but the amount of effort that would go into maintaining install kits for every phone out there would be crazy.

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This.

It's actually massively soured me on Android (as well as several vendors, yes, specifically you, Samsung) as a result.

Sony are great - key, unlock bootloader, flash twrp, install. Not that much harder than installing linux on modern laptop - enter bios, disable secureboot, curse 4 times until you find the second secure boot setting you also need to disable, exit bios, curse till you find the boot menu hotkey for this exact laptop, boot, install

Thanks, something I'll keep in mind.

The Samsung hardware, fetters and chains excepted, is tolerable. The software is crap.

What? All Samsung phones, at least in Europe, come unlocked and can be reflashed easily.

I think it is the carriers adding (or turning on) extra security features like Knox in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox

I actually just installed CyanogenMod on my Galaxy Nexus last week, and it was easy as pie. Is there something I'm missing? Or are newer Samsung phones more fettered?

AFAIU, the distinguishing characteristic of Nexus devices is that they're unlocked.

Yes, per Wikipedia:

"All Nexus devices feature an unlockable bootloader[3] to allow further development and end-user modification.[4]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Nexus

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-not-rooti...

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/03/galaxy-nexus-gets-rooted-...

Note that this still does you comparatively little good if you don't have CyanogenMod to put on it. Mind, I didn't say "no good", I said "little good".

It's the CyanogenMod dev team at Cyanogen Inc who've been impacted by the layoffs. There's still the independent effort, but it's lost a major employer and investor.

Good to know. I'll keep that in mind for my next phone.

Even if CyanogenMod suffers, there's plenty of other open-source Android versions out there. Unfortunately finding a clear, unbiased comparison of them is even harder than it is for different Linux distros. :(

I had to go through the goldcard process to flash my first Android phone, it took a while to get the right microSD card and you also had to install the Android SDK to use their flashing utilities, which wasn't the easiest thing to get up and running at the time.

I got there in the end, and I'm pretty sure most newer phones can be flashed in far easier ways.

For future reference you can user the Minimal ADB & Fastboot application rather than the full ADK.

Now, yes, but not when I was doing this for the first time.

I agree it's a pain - I've installed Cyanogenmod on a few Nexus devices (which are supposed to be the easiest ones) and it wasn't simple.

However is it intrinsically hard? Could you imagine a software tool you would run which would ask a few questions, automate as much as possible over the OTG port, and guide the user for the rest?

That's the kind of tool Cyanogen Inc could write. Of course monetizing it is another thing.

I think it is just a hard problem. Many devices with many Android versions and many provider customizations. And, oh yeah, the carriers are often going out of their way to make rooting as impossible as they can. Screw up badly enough and you can easily brick a phone.

They had 136 people. Solving the hard problems is what makes companies successful and what proprietary companies are good at, or so I'm always told. All the information you need exists on the Cyanogenmod wiki pages, it's a matter of grinding that into code.

I wrote something a while back that did this as a proof of concept/learning exercise... but it never took off:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2391493

Hey tire!

I've been wanting to do something like that for a long time, get away from the recoveries and politics of the different factions. Make something a user can just pick up an old device, run an install process, and have a fast new OS.

Google of course doesn't make it easy, mostly due to carrier and manufacturer demands. But also due to the lack of a defined ABI between the user interactive parts and the libraries for talking to hardware.

There's really no reason an operating environment couldn't be compiled for ARM and run on the majority of devices if this specification was enforced. I'm looking to gonk and a new Google initiative as a possible solution.

It may be intrinsically hard. The one time I installed Cyanogenmod, I rooted the phone thanks to a misconfiguration resulting in local privilege escalation. Now, if only the phone manufacturer or the carrier cared to close this vuln with an OTA... Cyanogen could find themselves in a security arms race, where they are the attackers. I don't even know if that wouldn't make it illegal to sell their kits in some countries.

I remember a time when apparently you could just navigate to get.cm on your phone and it would download an .apk specific to your phone which would perform the rooting/unlocking and install of cyanogenmod. But that effort seems to have failed. http://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-cyanogenmod/

You use fastboot to unlock the bootloader flash a recovery image then flash the main Rom. Its not too hard.

You say that as if there aren't countless pitfalls that can stop the process, e.g. phone not rooted, installing the tools to do it can be complicated, differences across operating systems, USB permission issues with the android tooling, tooling just not working for whatever reason, phone not behaving the way its supposed to once you are in the bootloader, recovery image doesn't install, the ROM download is bad, etc etc etc

These are not random examples - they ALL happened with the phone I am now typing on.

Its also not something a business could be built on top of, which is the original topic of this thread. Users expect single click installs.

Rooting and unlocking the bootloader are different. Root is having root on the OS. The Bootloader is what loads the various partitions. If your phone's bootloader is locked obviously flashing is a lot harder.

The mobile phone market is massive. Even if you can capture a small subset of the users you can make money. Not everyone needs a one step install process.

Problem is that on some phones, for instance my S4, if you don't root first, you can't install an alternative recovery ROM. Without an alternative recovery rom, you can't install a new OS that is not signed, so you can't install CM.

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