Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

But that is only one person whose phone is rendered unusable and not many as you insinuate. Same thing happened with PS4 launch when people reported issues, but statistic turned out to be <1%. This app is exactly for the non-technical people to stop messing around. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/android-roms-the-easy...

View on HN

I run a Android Development company and has high respect to Koush and others at CyanogenMod. I believe they add great value to android ecosystem. But CyanogenMod installation is anything but fool proof. Had issues on Nexus4 and 7(2013) personally.

CyanogenMod definitely doesn't belong in PlayStore. Having an app like that on Play Store enables many non techies to try it out without understanding repercussions. Who do you think these people will call?

Here is the order:

1. Carrier (Walk in Store)

2. Play Store Support Number (Surprise Surprise Google actually provides phone support)

3. ????

The same thing did not happen with the PS4 launch; there, the consumer can get a FREE replacement of the damaged goods. Here, you're SOL.

The best I can tell, this is like all of those teenagers installing Napster, Kazaa, or whatever on grandma's PC. Feds show up and "OMG, fines!? I didn't know! I'm computer dumb. I paid $10/month for all nsync!"

I love what CM is doing, but if lay persons and even "experts" are getting burnt, who is responsible? Who gets blamed? Google? Because that's the first place consumers are going to go or to distributors or manufacturers who are going to also going to defer to Google.

If an app bricks one phone in ten thousand, that's too much for the Play store. That doesn't mean the package can't exist outside of the Play store.

In fact, the ability to install something outside of the Play store framework seems like one good test for whether someone is ready to make the jump.

I tried it on my girlfriends S2; we followed the directions precisely but we got some odd error messages about the device not being found, and the phone stopped being able to boot. Had to go through a "normal" Cyanogen installation procedure to get it working again; not hard for me but nothing you want a non-technical person going through (hence why the installer exists).

I have no idea what the percentage of people having problems is, but it certainly happened to more than one person...

I think an accurate comparison would be EA providing software via the Playstation Store which attempts to change the OS, leading to a situation where the warranty becomes void and Sony refuses to replace or fix broken PS4s free of cost.

When problems creep up on a product like this, the user will get shafted badly in the end. Google will refuse to help (cue complaints about Google allowing potentially destructive apps in Play store) as they don't support either the software or the phone, the manufacturer will also wash their hands off it, CM does not provide support for this from what I understand.

I have been using Android phones since 2010 (rarely on a stock ROM) and even now flashing anything is done with a prayer on my lips. There are just too many things that can go wrong with the way it is done right now.

Same here. Been running Android since 2010 on 3rd party ROMs. Thought I'd bricked on more than one occasion but somehow got away with it. Guides purporting to provide the "definitive" or "foolproof" rooting / flashing method rarely do, leaving out crucial steps and not considering the full combination of starting points that might / will occur and the effect of tinkering.

I concur with justin66. The necessary skills to deal with something going awry would seem to be good criteria for searching out Cyanogenmod for themselves and making the jump rather than casually clicking on "install" in the play store.

To be fair, most of my bricking has been due to my own carelessness, including a dead boot that had to be finally rescued via the JTAG route. Even with the best guides, it is easy to miss a step or two no matter how many times you have done it before.

One downside of CM raising money is that they will have to go for high impact initiatives as a must-have than as a welcome side-effect of the stellar work that they have already been doing. Guess they will eventually go the route of CM phones or phones that come with CM pre-installed. The money they raised does not make sense for building a purely software offering.

Browse the support forums of carries and device makers and you'll find plenty of such testimonials. They would brick their devices and find themselves without warranty, which is not exactly an ideal situation.

It's not unheard of, but extremely rare to "brick" modern phones. Four years ago, when you had to replace the bootloader you could flash something that would "brick" a device to the point that only JTAG could fix it, but that hasn't been typical since the Nexus One. More commonly you can still access fastboot or ODIN and restore a system image which returns the device to a stock OS. This isn't ideal for non-tech savvy users, but it is a recoverable state.

I recovered once that way, but it is definitely an unrecoverably bricked device for my parents and even for my brother.

An app that bricks even <1% of the devices just doesn't belong in the app store where it gets exposure to lots of non technical users.

Why doesn't CyanogenMod replace or repair bricked devices, when their software caused that problem in the first place?

Why should Google or the device manufacturer pay for it?

Because it comes without any implied warranty as per the Apache 2.0 license[1] they use. Though when they go and put it on the Android Market, that creates a gray area that was not an issue when it was confined to the Android Modding Forums.

Users installing it outside the market though as it was always installed have no more right to Cyanogen giving them a new device than Debian or the Linux Foundation would if you destroy your PC installing Debian Linux.

https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_packages_apps_CMAccou...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com