The third-party ROM universe for Android phones

I've got this Verizon (CDMA/LTE) Galaxy Nexus, which I got specifically because it would be up-to-date. No boot-locking. Standard Google support. Etc.

Well, we all know how that turned out. Google and Verizon couldn't play nice, and I'm likely to have to wait a long, long time before there's a proper Android 4.1 release for my phone. Screw that! So I'm investigating the world of third-party ROM images, many of which are now available for the CDMA variant of the Galaxy Nexus based on the ROM images that Google released for the GSM/HSPA+ phone.

The canonical web site seems to be Rootzwiki. And, of course, there are a good number of different devs posting things, some of which have gone through quite a number of point releases in the last two weeks.

The comments are full of idiots. The big-name distributions like AOKP and Cyanogenmod only build from Google's AOSP source code, which isn't out yet for Android 4.1, so instead you're dealing with a second tier of support. Despite this, lots of users are reporting success.

I really don't want to waste my time. I also really don't want to have to wipe my phone clean and waste all the time to get everything reinstalled properly, which seems to be standard advice with many of these ROM installers.

Have any of you played with this world yet? Am I better off waiting for AOKP or Cyanogenmod?

For what it's worth, I don't think I want any of the kernel customization stuff that some people have been rolling in. I do want my phone to continue to be rooted.

I'm not sure if it's possible to go from stock to a third party ROM without wiping. In general, it seems a wipe is recommended even when going from one major version of Cyanogenmod to another.


If you don't want to waste time wiping and restoring, you should wait for one of the big names. I stick to Cyanogenmod because that's what I'm most familiar with, and has lots of support. AOKP has become popular in the last few months, but I still would stick with Cyanogenmod.

I've been running the stock Jelly Bean released at I/O for over a week, and it's noticeably smoother than ICS. I still wouldn't say the touchscreen response is on-par with iOS, but most people won't notice.

I have just started messing with this stuff so I am no expert.

You can try out different roms without losing your current data. For me to install a custom rom I had to install clockwork mod recovery and with that you can make a backup image that you can just restore if you don't like the new rom.

You can also use titanium backup plus to back up applications and or application settings. I used that to keep some game saves that I restored to the new rom after re-installing the game.

Dan, why mess around with the alternative ROMs, most of which are based on older versions of Android, as you've noticed, when you can just flash Jelly Bean on it right now? I'm telling you, it's freaking awesome.

Like Rob said, Butter makes the phone noticeably smoother. Google Now has the potential to be pretty cool, but I'll have to see. Then there's the voice search update. I'd say it's not quite as full-featured as Siri, but I feel like the voice recognition might be a tad better, and the voice its self is much more natural sounding, IMO. The whole thing is certainly a huge improvement over what Android had before, and the natural language part is a great relief. Before, you had to know the exact phrasing of voice commands, like "Set alarm for X." Granted, X could be "3:37pm" or it could be "37 minutes from now," but that's as much leeway as you got. Now you can phrase it a number of ways, like "wake me up at X," or "remind me to Y in X minutes," stuff like that. Oh, and the results page from the voice commands is much more attractive. Overall, I think that Duarte character is doing a great job with the visual improvement of Android.

So yeah, give Jelly Bean a try. The alternative roms are fine, and I'm a big Cyanogen fan, but I promise you that Jelly Bean is a big improvement that you'll notice.

Plus, just unlocking and rooting it gives you the ability to try a few roms out at a time if you have a rom manager installed.

Just to clarify, the "official" Jellybean ROM is for the HSPA+ variant of the Galaxy Nexus. The various third-party ROMs have customized it for the CDMA/LTE variant of the phone, which is what I have. I don't really care about having lots of goofy skins or whatnot, but I do want the various bug-fixes. (Apparently there are some issues with the stock Jellybean on the CDMA/LTE phone: WiFi signal strength, deep sleep problems, etc. The third-party ROMs claim to fix all this.)

For future reference, I'm going to keep editing this particular post with URLs I find online that seem vaguely useful. There's a huge amount of not-useful stuff out there.

Here's a nice description of how to backup an Android device (contrasting nandroid vs. Titanium Backup): http://www.androidnz.net/2011/10/at-your-own-risk-how-to-backup-your.html

Pointers to lots of Jellybean ROM images: http://rootzwiki.com/news/_/articles/jel...xus-owners-r951

When you're dumping lots of new files to your SD card, they don't show up via MTP. The solution? An app that forces a re-scan of the /sdcard directory: https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...LnNkcmVzY2FuIl0

This seems to be the ROM of choice for a "stock" Jellybean experience on a CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus. The thread has a lot of discussion on GPS and battery life issues. I'm going to try to follow the advice about clearing the Dalvik cache and such and hope it all works: http://rootzwiki.com/topic/28992-rom-razors-jelly-v26-verizonjelly-bean-41-8-july/

After all that, I ended up with what might as well have been a fresh new phone running Android 4.1. Not too painful. The actual painful part is getting all my apps restored. The Google Play Store apps are all downloading automatically, but restoring their state is where that Titanium Backup will come into play. And then there are the Amazon Store apps, which you have to reinstall one by one. Much more annoying.

Between this morning, when I installed v2.5, and this evening, the dev who made the above ROM released a new version (v2.6) which fixed some bugs. Upgrading wasn't too bad. I followed the instructions (wipe the cache and Dalvik cache) and everything came right back. No need to wipe and reinstall.

Good list of links Dan! Still my only problem with my Desire HD is that it is the only phone I have had so far that I can't gain access to. There seem to be a wide range of instructions for older versions, but nothing that can get root access to a Desire HD with Android 2.3.5.

You seem to be very switched on with this stuff - am I just being dense?

I just fancy some of the power management stuff, and the ability to try different roms.

Wikipedia claims: "On February 9, 2012, HTC announced in their Facebook page stating that Desire HDs would be upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in late 2012."

Cyanogenmod does support your phone for CM7, but that's not ICS.

Somebody else has apparently dragged ICS from a different HTC device and shoehorned it into your phone (http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/05/16/htc-desire-hd-ice-cream-sandwich-update-how-to-get-it-now/). If you're going to go that route, make sure you do the backup routine after rooting your phone. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

Or, you could just wait until "July-August" when HTC claims they will officially support ICS on your phone (link).

Ahhh - that could work. I guess that will translate to within the next 2 or 3 months.

And it avoids trying to find another way to root the phone, as none seem to work.

Thanks

Can you imagine how hard all this would be if Android wasn't so wide open?

If you've got the proper "Google Experience" phone (currently the HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus), it's all rainbows and unicorns. Beyond that, things degrade.

Ahh.. a "pentaband" phone, too!

I've decided (more or less) to see what the whole smartphone fad is about when my current voice-phone contract expires next month. The trick seems to be finding a phone that works for most of the Canadian networks, and the Galaxy Nexus looks promising (gotta do a bit more research to know for sure).

Thanks

Do all iPhones get IOS releases at the same time regardless of carrier? (Not a rhetorical question -- I honestly have no idea how iOS upgrades work.)

It is indeed a bit ridiculous that you have to not only have the right phone but also be on the right carrier (or, more accurately, be on the right radio technology) to get timely updates. I wasn't expecting my CDMA Nexus S to get Jelly Bean any time soon, but everyone who has a Galaxy Nexus should have gotten it from day one, not just the GSM owners.

Google just needs to force all their employees to run non "Google Experience" phones for a year. I'd bet the situation would start to improve shortly after.

I still find it weird that Verizon was able to sell a Nexus product and still muck with it.

Yep. When Apple flips a switch, any iPhone from any carrier or network technology gets the update. With iOS 5, these updates are available OTA as well as via iTunes. Apple doesn't do a push, the phones and iTunes just check in on a weekly basis for new software. People can manually check for an update to get it on day one. And from my understanding, these files come from Apple servers, not carrier specific servers.

Are all phones with "Nexus" in the name proper "Google Experience" handsets, or just that specific model?

All of them, but the Galaxy Nexus is the current generation. Nexus One and Nexus S are the previous generation, though I've heard my Nexus S will still get Android 4.1/Jelly Bean, just not right away.

Though as I understand it the new Galaxy Nexus on Verizon has a locked boot loader.

I really doubt that. I'm sure Google knows the problem, because it's not them that's creating the problem or is able to do much about it. It's the manufacturers and the carriers that are mucking this up. Google did put Android in this position by making it open in the first place, and the manufacturers took Android, ran with it, then closed it again.

Currently it looks like Google's only recourse is their new Nexus initiative, where supposedly they'll allow multiple Nexus devices, which will be sold unsubsidized on the Google Play store, but can't be sold there unless it's running plain Android.

As someone who also rushed out to get the Galaxy Nexus on release morning because he thought he was getting a true Nexus device, I'm seriously pissed off at Verizon and Samsung, and will most likely not patron either of them for my phones in the future.

But in the end, I'm pretty jazzed about my Galaxy Nexus right now. Jelly Bean is phenomenal! I haven't had this kind of performance increase since Froyo and the JIT compiler, and the feature upgrades easily earn the .1 version increase.

My impression is that they ALL have a "locked" bootloader, which is easily "unlocked" using freely available tools. After which the phones can be "rooted" and "reflashed" as desired.

At the very least, the Nexus One's bootloader was never locked at all.

All "Nexus" branded phones ship locked but are trivial to unlock. You just plug into your computer and run a few commands.

There are two different Galaxy Nexus phones: the CDMA/LTE version (offered on Verizon and Sprint) and the GSM/HSPA+ version (offered without contract on Google's home page for $349).

The GSM/HSPA+ model is directly supported by Google. Google releases new versions of Android and pushes the changes directly to you. Or you can grab the appropriate files, copy them to your phone, and install them. The AOSP (Android open source project) code builds an image for the GSM/HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus, out of the box.

The CDMA/LTE model was supposed to be supported the same way, but then Google and Verizon had some sort of pissing match. Consequently, if you want to be bleeding-edge, you need to install crap manually, like I did. For better or for worse, these two Galaxy Nexus variants are sufficiently similar to one another that the hacker community was able to take a memory dump of the GSM/HSPA+ variant and mod it to run perfectly on the CDMA/LTE variant. That's what I'm running today.

Now that the public repository has been updated (yesterday) with Android 4.1, the big distros like CyanogenMod will start working it into their own build plans.

If you were a basic Verizon customer with zero interest in any of the sorcery required to update your phone yourself, Verizon would eventually get around to shipping you a new build. Ultimately, this is the only path that people like me have to getting updates to the closed-source parts of our phones (radio drivers, etc.).

I have been playing with an interesting phone since yesterday. It may be appealing to a North American looking to check out Android for the least possible amount of money, but with high carrier flexibility.

I acquired a new T-Mobile Samsung Exhibit II 4G for $189 (no contract). The goal was to use it as a mobile hotspot on the $30 "Walmart plan" we've discussed on this BBS before. The phone actually allows WiFi and USB tethering with stock T-Mobile firmware, but the TouchWiz'd version of Android 2.3.5 wasn't my style. There is an unofficial port of CM9 for the phone.

Before I mess with any phone, I unlock it first. This is just for the future and I ran into an LG phone once that wouldn't present the unlock code input screen with anything but stock firmware. So, the total cost for this phone was $189 + $24 for the unlock code.

The first pleasant surprise came when I stuck an AT&T SIM in the phone to input the unlock code. The stock firmware was reporting a 3G connection on AT&T (not just T-Mobile). Indeed, the specs on GSMArena claim this phone is quadband HSPA, but with 850MHz (AT&T, Rogers, etc.) instead of 900MHz (some of Europe and Asia).

The phone's bootloader is unlocked right out of the box. To flash the CM9 ROM, all I had to do was flash CWM Recovery from the stock recovery, and then flash CM9 from CWM Recovery. That was the second pleasant surprise.

So, you can see that I now have a nice, modern, unlocked, ICS smartphone that works on all North American HSPA systems for $213 USD (plus a little work). The downside is that the CM9 ROM doesn't quite work with the camera. This would prevent it from being a daily driver for most people, but it's just being used as a mobile hotspot in my case. I doubt the camera will be an issue much longer, but there is no guarantee.

Below is a screen shot I took a couple minutes ago with an AT&T SIM in the phone. 3G speeds.... no problem.

USA-only. (?)

But that does explain where all of the fly-by-night shops are sourcing Galaxy Nexus handsets for resale so cheaply (by CDN standards).

I found a reseller in Toronto flogging them for USD$375, which I suppose is quite reasonable if they get them from Google for $349.

Cheers

Needless to say, you've got friends on this side of the border...

Thanks. I'm actually expecting to see the UPS delivery guy later this week already though.

The carriers here have been selling them for CDN$600 WITH contract until this past week (when the III came out), and now they merely want CDN$500 for a Galaxy Nexus. I went for the fly-by-night importer instead.

That way my business still has a proper tax-paid paper trail to keep the suits happy. If I were purchasing with my personal funds I might have tried the tax-free route.

Cheers

That is the phone I have it is interesting to hear you can use it on AT&T.

I am using this ROM http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1435286 It's only Gingerbread but it is fast and all the crapware is gone.

It messed with the CM9 that is out there and besides not having a camera there was a lot of lag.

I think I was mixing it up with the Samsung Galaxy S III on Verizon, which is a bit more locked down I believe.

There are just too many Samsung Galaxy phones to keep track of

My GSM/HSPA+ variant of the Galaxy Nexus just arrived, and just in time before my trip to Europe. Turns out, the one I bought was a Samsung variant (codename YAKJUXW -- same hardware but different firmware), which gets its updates from Samsung, not Google. This sucks for a variety of reasons. Most notably, if you let the phone update itself, it will get to Android 4.0.2 and then consider itself "up to date".

(If you're buying directly from Google, this won't be an issue for you. If you're buying elsewhere, here's how to fix it.)

There are some reasonable noob instructions for fixing this. In short, you get your phone set up for USB debugging and then you can run adb and fastboot commands from your computer. You download the 4.0.4 image directly from Google's Android images. I grabbed the "takju" image for Android 4.0.4 + Google Wallet. That tarball unpacks and includes a "flash-all.sh" shell script. All you do is first run "adb reboot bootloader" and then that shell script. Here's another good link that describes the process.

This process completely wipes the phone. Needless to say, don't start installing your personal stuff on the phone until you get done with all the upgrading.

Okay, but a phone running 4.0.4 doesn't (yet) automagically update to 4.1.1. Now that AOSP is out, this should be available at the Google link, above, at some point, but it isn't today. Nonetheless, the incremental updates exist. This page has the links. My phone, with 4.0.4, is running the IMM76I build (which you can learn by running "adb pull /system/build.prop" and reading the text in the file). So I downloaded the 147MB zip file labeled "takju JRO03C from IMM76I".

Once you've got this zip file, it's simplest to follow "method 2" (stock recovery, unlocked bootloader) to get it installed. I used adb to push the zip file over to the phone, then "adb reboot bootloader" and "fastboot boot cwm.img" and you're good to go. And it worked!

Lastly, when you do this, you have an unlocked phone, but you don't have root on it. If you want root, then these instructions are overkill but seem correct. The gist is that you push a zip file which has SuperSU in it, and which can be run from the CWM bootloader. The relevant discussion threat for SuperSU is over here, which has a link to the latest version, ready to go.

Honestly, it's (much) easier to both jailbreak and unlock an iPhone than it is to deal with an Android phone that's supposed to already be "open." Hard to believe.

I'll put that theory to the test this evening, once my new Galaxy Nexus arrives.

There's a simple menu-driven MS-Windows app to unlock it, root it, upgrade it, enhance it, whatever.. Sounds dumb simple to me, but we'll see how it goes in reality from a VMware image.

EDIT: Here's a link to the app again.

Cheers

Darnit! I didn't have it so easy. It took a good deal of work to get mine done. But that's just what happens. The longer these phones are out the better the tools to mess with them are.

I will say, though, that I had a tool which was supposed to make everything a series of clicks, but it turned out to be MUCH harder than that because something didn't work in the process and I couldn't find any information as to why. Mostly to do with drivers not installing correctly, I think. Then again, my current system is a complete mess held together with baling wire and duct tape

The only place where you need to pay attention when doing a DIY upgrade is ensuring that you also update the radio firmware. If you go with the big incremental dumps that take you from one official release to another, then you get all of the firmware updates as part of the big package. If you just grab a random ROM image from the Internet, you don't necessarily get all that. The conservative thing is to first update your phone, with stock software, from whatever initial state you get all the way to the most recent 4.1.1. Once you're there, then you can start playing with third-party builds, if you want.


This is partly true, and partly bogus. If you're a naïve user who wants things to "just work", then updates happen over the air, automatically, without any care or thought on your part. They just magically work. However, different Android phones get updates at different times, and even the vaunted Galaxy Nexus has these odd variants, like the YUKJUXW tweak that Samsung sold, which goes to them rather than to Google for updates. That sort of fragmentation, on the same damn hardware, is simply inexcusable.

In the Apple universe, there's always a battle between the unlockers and Apple. They keep exploiting security vulnerabilities and Apple keeps patching them. It's amazing that the Apple unlockers have been as successful as they've been. In the Android universe, with an official Nexus phone, there's no exploitation. It's a supported feature, but it's meant for devs, not end users, thus all this 'adb' and 'fastboot' nonsense. As Mark noted, there's a tool that wraps all of this behind a nice GUI, if that's what you really want.

The only hard part is finding suitable documentation. Those chat forums are a disaster. That's why I wrote these things here, for my own benefit it not others, so you've got the minimum number of links that you need to get it done.

Okay, that worked, and wasn't too onerous.
I used the toolkit to unlock, root, and upgrade the phone to stock ICS 4.0.4, and then the phone itself found some over-the-air (wifi) upgrade that it's self-installing now. Hopefully Jelly Bean.

Yep. Jelly Bean 4.1.1 now running.

Cool!

Any particular SSH client known to be "good" ?

ConnectBot works well enough for my limited stuff. It's not great using a shell though since you often need more specialised characters than just A-Z etc on regular keyboard. Going to the alternate keyboard pages becomes a bit clunky. Always going to be that way I think you'll find though.

Agreed.

Mmm.. I'm not sure that the SSH client will be useful here -- my servers require a "door knock" sequence before the SSH attempt.

Might need a real live terminal shell for that.

ConnectBot also has a local terminal option. It's also open source, so you should be able to add a knock sequence option to it.

One nit: the all-in-one toolkit I used fails to re-root the phone once it's running Jelly Bean. Other more detailed recipes also failed.

Then I found this excellent tutorial for rooting Jelly-Bean from somebody with similar problems.

Why root? Well, I needed it here so I could run AdFree to kill off the in-app advertising from certain other useful apps. This program updates /etc/hosts, which requires root access to do.

And finally I discovered that "adb" (or adb-linux) is the way to really get into the handset. Useful, that.

Cheers

Mmm.. I don't seem to be able to get "local port forwards" to work in ConnectBot. Anyone else have any luck with those?

Googled it -- it's been broken that way since the last update in 2010, with several people reporting the bug (and one guy pointing out how to fix it in the Java source code too).

Oh well.. need to find a different SSH client now.

As in port tunnelling? Sorry for the bum steer then.

Can you just use the built in VPN client instead?

Depends what you're trying to achieve exactly.

I use SSH with port forwarding for remote access here, rather than a (likely simpler) full-blown OpenVPN setup.

But.. I've now uninstalled the old version of ConnectBot, grabbed the latest developer version of it from Google Code, and installed that: forwarding now works!

Thanks

Local port forwards work on my phone with the version from Play. I use it to RDP into my home computer

Yeah, it partially worked for me here too. I dunno what exactly was the issue, but the built-in email client had tons of trouble with it -- that piece of excrement (email) was horrible, and I eventually clued in and replaced it with something better.

I think some programs (random) don't accept IP addresses in place of hostnames in some situations -- the email client was definitely one of those, as was ConnectBot.

Cheers

One annoyance of the Galaxy Nexus / Jelly Bean, is that the phone turns the screen ON whenever the power source changes. Eg. When I connect a power cable, it turns ON. Ditto when I disconnect the power cable.

Bloody nuisance and (small) waste of battery power.
Anyone know how to disable this behaviour?

Thanks.

Mmm.. as usual, there's an app for that too. Weird that it's not a built-in option though.

One persons nuisance is another persons confirmation that they actually did plug the device into a source of power, instead of a cord that is unplugged/unpowered on the other end.

I've had several times over the past few years where this behavior has saved me from having a dead phone in the morning instead of one fully charged.

If that were the motivation, then a simple pair of "bleep" noises would more than suffice.

Unless the owner of the phone was deaf of course.

That's why phones also have built-in vibrators -- works for the deaf phone users as well as the multitudes of *blind* users.

Mark points out one my my iPhone annoyances - the phone's screen comes on AND it beeps loudly when plugged in. I wish I could turn both of those off, a vibration is more than enough. Just more typical lack of attention to detail from Apple.

The other use of the visual indicator is to see existing charge status. If I unplug a not fully charged phone, I'll know right away that I may want to use a vehicle charger. No need to remember to push a button to see it.

Blind users would dislike that "automatically drain the battery feature".

When my GN is plugged in or unplugged, it lights up the battery-draining display with the ever-so-not-useful lock screen shown.

Or at least it used to do that before I installed the app to kill that misfeature.

Cheers

I have to wonder how many blind users use touch-screen phones.

You'd be surprised, the iPhone has a very strong blind following and excellent support for blind users.

Here's one of them:

Even the camera application on the iPhone is blind accessible. It will announce the number of faces detected, and location in the frame.

Stevie Wonder thanked Steve Jobs and Apple during a concert last year: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/114311105135906816

Cool. I had no idea...

Finally, I've found somebody who spells out what all of these mysterious (to me) Windows "toolkits" and "upgraders" etc.. are actually doing. Here's the step-by-step guide for doing it in a simple, driver-free way, from the command line (on Linux, but should also work from OS/X or WinXX):

http://www.cvr.cc/jelly-bean-on-your-galaxy-nexus-phone/

FYI, there's a leak of the Verizon Galaxy Nexus Jelly Bean update. You can find instructions here.

My primary desktop is packed away (we're trying to move), so I had to learn how to unroot, flash, root, etc on my MacBook. That was an interesting experience. As you might imagine, there isn't much information out there for Mac users on Android rooting/roming, but I was able to patch enough together to get it done, and in the end it was actually pretty easy. It was certainly the most time I've spent in the Terminal so far