But is flashing a third party rom necessarily a good thing, or does it come with some sort of consequence?
Today you can go to rootzwiki.com, xda-developers.com, or any other website that may promote rooting and flashing of other roms and pick through a slew of different roms for what ever handset that you may carry. So what factors would push someone to move away from a stock rom to a third party custom rom?
With this post I will go over the pros and cons of this choice and why you may or may not want to go in this particular direction.
At this point it is safe to say that a majority of us carry a cell phone of some sort, and a great portion of those are probably android handsets. But out of all of those android phones, tablets, and players are the people using them actually satisfied with the overall performance of them? Nine times out of ten the answer is no, and the reason is that at some point in time you have had issues with your device that have prevented you from doing something at some point in time.
So why do you stick with a stock device?
Well the answer is a simple one to be honest. People who own these devices are afraid or worried that they will end up with a brick, or they are ok with what they have and dont want to change that.
The pro's that are associated with this particular move would be:
- A more responsive handset
- less force closed applications
- more options for customizing your experience
- ability to remove bloatware
- access to wifi tether/hotspot without paying for it
- optimization of the OS
- better management of your device
Listed below are some con's that exist with this process:
- You will void your warranty
- You run the risk of flashing a bad rom that could brick your phone
- You run the risk of bricking your phone and cant recover it period.
- The rom could still be in beta stages and lack many features that are required for everyday use
- You may run into software glitches that pevent usage of many features and applications on your device that may require you to flash back to stock and repeat all the steps in order.
- Lack of support for handsets and roms developed for them, this is seen with older handsets that have been phased out.
So why should someone do this or explore the idea of flashing or rooting their phone?
Ideally a person who would want to do this is tired of what they have and cant afford to upgrade or are far from their ability to upgrade and they want more from their device. If this is the case, as it normally is, then this is something that should be considered. Essentially, this will bring new life to your handset and bring the user a different and usually a better experience which allows the user to get more out of their device and usually hold on to it longer.
Major cellphone providers such as AT&t like to tell the general public that flashing their phones with custom roms could affect the overall ability of the phone to operate correctly on their network, but the truth is when a rom is developed the starting point is with the phone itself. What I mean by this is the developer is going to build a rom that is based on the device and modify what is already there by taking out bloatware, tweak settings, removing the UI built into the rom by the manufaturer and replacing it with the stock android UI, and improving the overall reliability and performance of the device. This of course is tested multiple times, put through alpha, beta, and RC stages, and then pushed out as a stable build. So how does the affect the performance of the phone on the network it belongs to? The answer is that it works just as well if not better.
So why wouldnt someone want to make this move?
Usually the answer is simply this, the user is happy with what they have and they dont care about modding their phone. These users are satisfied with browsing the web, making phone calls, and maybe using some apps here and there and dont believe they need anything more than that to do what they need.
Personally I have done this to every phone that I have had except two, and I do not regret ever doing this.
So lets hear what device(s) you may have and how you have modded them in the past of recently.
