Custom Android ROMs

[Renai LeMayKeymaster]

hey everyone,

I’m thinking of delving into the complex world of custom Android ROMs, with a view to updating my HTC One XL to Jelly Bean. I’ve played with Jelly Bean on the Nexus 7, and frankly, what I would like most in the world right now is a default Jelly Bean install of Android on my phone. The HTC Sense stuff is starting to annoy me, and to be honest I want to get my Project Butter on.

Anyone played with any custom Android ROMs? Where should I start looking at this? I’ve checked out CyanogenMod, but it doesn’t look as though it has great One XL support.

Renai

[mlimburgParticipant]

I’m quite interested in this topic also. I have a Galaxy Nexus, and whilst current OS is pretty damn good, I’ve heard nothing but awesomeness about battery life improvements with other ROM options.

[Renai LeMayKeymaster]

Yeah it would be quite hard right now for the battery life on my One XL to be worse … so I figure I might as well test the waters ;)

[cheapbeerbaronParticipant]

I don’t know much about the HTC phones, but AOKP(everything but the kitchen sink), codename android(toned down AOKP) and bugless beast have releases for lot of devices so there might be one for your phone. Also custom kernels can we worth a look if they do something worthwhile like colour control or sound enhancements. Titanium backup and Backup to gmail will help save info between wipes

[Renai LeMayKeymaster]

“I don’t know much about the HTC phones, but AOKP(everything but the kitchen sink), codename android(toned down AOKP) and bugless beast have releases for lot of devices so there might be one for your phone. Also custom kernels can we worth a look if they do something worthwhile like colour control or sound enhancements. Titanium backup and Backup to gmail will help save info between wipes”

Very useful info — exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Cheers! Will let you guys know how I go. My HTC One XL received some OTA update today from Telstra/HTC … but it really didn’t appear to do much. I had been hoping it was Jelly Bean, but it didn’t turn out to be :( Don’t know what’s taking them so long …

[Run.dllParticipant]

Hey Renai,

Here’s how I recently fixed my Optus Galaxy S2 stuck on an old firmware Android 2.3.3 (XWKE2), I didn’t use a custom ROM but the process still covered custom ROM methods.

http://thomas.randle.id.au/blog/2012/10/18/updating-an-optus-firmware-samsung-galaxy-s2/

[Renai LeMayKeymaster]

Interest, thanks for the post Run.dll. I am planning to investigate updating my HTC One XL tonight; I’m going to use your post and a few others as a starting point and learn along the way. It can’t be harder than installing Red Hat 5.2 about a decade ago on a Windows 98SE PC … right? Right? Oh wait, there goes the bootloader …

[LimeParticipant]

Ah bootloader fun :)

My experience with updating ROMs has been pretty smooth, but I haven’t updated a One XL yet.

Any popular handset will generally get good roms, ViperXL is getting good reviews:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1868236

Also when it comes to unlocking, my advice is if you want to be using it tomorrow, only use instructions for your specific handset and carrier (if available). Little differences can cause the process to not work, and restoring from backups can be nerve racking.

Assuming you’re on Telstra, I’d follow these instructions:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1859478

Let us know how you go :)

[David W. CampbellParticipant]

I have dabbled in custom ROMs and I find the ParanoidAndroid series very fun to work with, it rather uniquely allows for setting custom desktop layouts on a per app bases, so you can switch on the fly between androids tablet, phablet and phone UI’s in order to display an app in your preferred layout (you may like chrome to work in tablet mode because it looks nicer for example displaying tabls like the desktop version of chrome, or facebook in phone mode because its built to work in phone mode and behaves badly in other modes) it is based on CyanogenMod I believe so it has a good base. There is a stable ROM for the One XL here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1775322

I don’t own a One XL but when unlocking and flashing any of these devices I find it is prudent to read the instructions very carefully 4 or 5 times and if your not sure ask plenty of questions, instructions are generally fairly easy but if you stray from the path it can be a bit of a nightmare to unbrick devices, thankfully I’ve only had to do that once to my Nexus7 it is a lot harder on more locked down devices from HTC though. Also good to remember some ROM’s are not built with Australia in mind and can have radios that provide worse reception or not be bundled with correct network APN data so you need to manually set these up after flashing.

Good luck, and I recommend using Titanium Backup from the Play store as it allows you to backup all of your apps and preferences to an SD card and then restore them later after you have flashed a new ROM, its not 100% fool proof but it does a reasonable job most of the time.

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