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Comment by fro0116 | Hacker News Reader

I'd personally love to see a ROM that focuses less on customizations and adding their own "flavor" to Android, and just attempts to track AOSP as closely as possible while supporting as many devices as possible, so users whose devices are no longer supported by their manufactures (or who just don't like the customizations the manufacturers have made to the UX) can continue enjoying the latest Android improvements in UX & security.

LineageOS is great, and already supports a wide range of devices, but all the features/changes it has accumulated over bare Android means it necessarily has a much harder time porting to the latest versions of Android, and supporting new devices compared a ROM without those customizations.

If a ROM like that already exists, I'd love to hear about it.

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It's called AOSP. Community makes AOSP images for a bunch different devices. If you are looking for one image that supports multiple devices look for AOSP treble rom.

If you mean the XDA developers AOSP roms, then they are most definitely NOT pure AOSP - Those guys are incapable of just building a rom from AOSP without adding their own cruft.

Not to mention that the XDA Developers site is impossible to navigate.

Lineage at least feels like a legit project. I can’t feel too sure downloading random ROMs (with closed-source additions) from XDA considering how shady the entire thing feels. 'jcs sums it up nicely: https://mobile.twitter.com/jcs/status/1069346105069092864

I think the forum software (phpBB and its clones) must be partly to blame. I don't think I've ever been to a phpBB-style forum that wasn't like that.

Contrast it with StackOverflow for example.

LineageOS also has proprietary blobs inside.

I have been a programmer/hacker for a long time, but the XDA dev forum is still some kind of obscure place I do not understand.

Also the tone is not very user friendly in general, I understand that when you post a rom you built you don't want to do support, but it can be pretty hostile.

The whole Android ecosystem seems so immensely bloated and convoluted. A repository size of >80GB just to build an embedded OS? Memory requirements are also huge.

The divergence from mainline linux, creating a new HAL interface, so much code and logic duplication which already existed elsewhere as FOSS software.

Same applies to LineageOS. Most images of LineageOS also have patches for driver support etc. Only small number of images are official.

>If a ROM like that already exists, I'd love to hear about it.

If you have a pixel device, this works quite well: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack.

OP's question is probably targeting the mid to low end devices, and not an officially supported Google manufactured device. For example, none of my phones (past & present) have ever been supported by any serious rom streams (not counting xda)

That's just how it is. If you care about stuff like this, buy a pixel. If you are short on cash, wait for a year for prices to drop. There is little meaningful difference these days between a new mid/low device and last year's pixel.

OmniROM is another option:

https://www.omnirom.org/

They beat LineageOS to Android 9 Pie by a couple of months, but only for several supported devices.

As logical as your request is, I feel like it is basically an impossible ask. Any ROM with a sufficiently large community to support a large number of devices will also have contributers who want to add their favorite feature. And how will you say no to key device maintainers?

If I'm not mistaken, there are a decent number of small projects that just rebuild AOSP, with little real momentum behind them.

https://github.com/hashbang/os

Only pixel support so far. Also:

> Testers, builders, and hosting bandwidth needed.

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