Why there are more and more customized OS?

[damaliya]

The development of smartphone raised rapidly, the trend of smartphone future has became the competition of operating system, like IOS and Android. Now, customized OS begin to occupy parts of smartphone market, which inherits the advantages of Android and adds some special functions, most of them come from China.

Up to now, I know MIUI for XIAOMI, Neonado for Axgio, Flyme for MEZIZU, Color OS for OPPO, Smartisan OS and LEWA.

What's your comment on these OS, why there are more and more customized systems appear on the market?

 

[paperwastage]

The manufacturers want to offer something different/unique, to attract customers. It's no longer enough to have hardware differences because everyone uses the same top-end qualcomm snapdragon, 2-4GB ram, some 1080p-2160p screen etc

Sometimes, those features are useful (eg multiwindow, useful widgets/tweaks on top of the base ROM). You have cm11/omni who try to offer the same useful features across many devices (instead of just being built for one day vice, like coloros is for oppo)

Sometimes the extra tweaks slows down the phone too much, or are considered distasteful by the customer, or haven't gone through enough QA and are full of bugs. Or the changes clash with each other, and "device ships with two browsers, two voice assistant apps, two galleries, two app stores, three music players, and four texting apps"

This is why we see gpe devices now- there is a demand for skinned phones with touchwiz, and a demand for a "less customized by manufacuter" phone with gpe.

For me, I want choice- phones should come with touchwiz and a non skinned android aosp, and I get to choose between the two. Of course, this costs manufacturer s more money and some don't want to give out aosp because they think their skins are the best and everyone must use it

Maybe, we'll see Windows OS available across the devices as a separate ROM: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014...e-m8-for-windows-the-first-os-agnostic-phone/

Also: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/the-state-of-android-updates-whos-fast-whos-slow-and-why/

 

[shortylickens]

Like desktop computers, we are slowly getting to the point where hardware doesnt matter. Now its time to properly take advantage of it and make software that does everything you want.

Manufacturers stick out more when they can provide a custom experience that users will like.
Thats why I had a hard time selecting between Sony and Samsung. It wasnt the hardware I was concerned about. It was my experience with each software environment.

Samsung had some things I liked, and so did Sony. Eventually I went with samsung.

 

[Ravynmagi]

I think most of these mentioned (not sure) are based in China. China blocks a lot of Google Play services and I think most phones are sold without Google Play. So the Chinese manufactures are free of that competition and are able to develop their own Android platforms with their own app stores and such.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Honestly a lot of this stuff is ripping off CM, throwing a skin on top and then making money on it.

 

[Mopetar]

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that a lot of the customization is just cruft that adds little value or actually subtracts from it. The stock Android experience is far superior to everything the OEMs put out, but I do think some of the custom ROMs have a place in the world.

The biggest opportunity for Android customization, in my opinion, is custom app stores. While several million apps sounds like a great selling point, what it really means is that there are millions of apps that a pure crap; it's Sturgeon's law for smartphones. The value to be added is not having to sift through the haystack to find the needle.

I'm mildly surprised that some OEM hasn't tried to create a heavily curated app store where they only have a few thousand apps, but any of those apps are worth having as they're the best of breed. They could even offer an 80/20 split if the app authors would agree to ensure that all of the flagship devices were supported.

 

[QueBert]

MIUI's one of my favorite variants of Android, I change roms often, but I always end up going back to it. I just installed Carbon Rom tonight, will probably be running MIUI by months end though. Whatever the case, I absolutely detest stock Android and would be 100% iOS if these roms didn't exist, so I'm glad we have choices like these.

 

[Red Storm]

MIUI's one of my favorite variants of Android, I change roms often, but I always end up going back to it. I just installed Carbon Rom tonight, will probably be running MIUI by months end though. Whatever the case, I absolutely detest stock Android and would be 100% iOS if these roms didn't exist, so I'm glad we have choices like these.

Curious, what exactly do you detest about stock Android?

 

[dawheat]

Curious, what exactly do you detest about stock Android?

Detest is a bit strong, but I do find it a bit stark without any built-in methods to customize the look and feel. I've become a fan of CM through the OPO - it seems to remain pretty lightweight while still adding a reasonable amount of customization and controls.

 

[Red Storm]

Detest is a bit strong, but I do find it a bit stark without any built-in methods to customize the look and feel. I've become a fan of CM through the OPO - it seems to remain pretty lightweight while still adding a reasonable amount of customization and controls.

Even with the OPO I still ended up going back to Nova Launcher. I was actually very surprised that CM did not have the gesture shortcuts like swiping down for the notification bar, that one's pretty basic.

I'm curious to see what it is exactly that QueBert doesn't like that he has to resort to custom Roms. It must be something that can't be changed by apps, launchers, or even root/Xposed modules?

 

[zCypher]

Detest is a bit strong, but I do find it a bit stark without any built-in methods to customize the look and feel. I've become a fan of CM through the OPO - it seems to remain pretty lightweight while still adding a reasonable amount of customization and controls.

how are you defining light weight? from my experience with custom roms, usually the custom rom is a fraction of the size of the stock bloated OS, all the while offering even more functionality. my experiences have been that the good custom roms have performed better than the stock roms by a large margin in every respect. this doesn't include the crappy roms, of course. and if you are comparing them to the vanilla google OS and not a touchwiz or similar atrocity, then it'll be less of a stark difference.

 

[dawheat]

how are you defining light weight? from my experience with custom roms, usually the custom rom is a fraction of the size of the stock bloated OS, all the while offering even more functionality. my experiences have been that the good custom roms have performed better than the stock roms by a large margin in every respect. this doesn't include the crappy roms, of course. and if you are comparing them to the vanilla google OS and not a touchwiz or similar atrocity, then it'll be less of a stark difference.

I agree - I'm running Dynamic Kat on my AT&T Note 3 which is a debloated KK ROM based on the international Samsung base. No bloatware, performance and smoothness is much better, all the decent stuff Samsung adds is still there (multi-window, etc), battery life is better, and it's as stable as stock.

I've found CM11S to be good enough to not be interested in running a custom ROM. I am using Nova as well (I do on all my phones) partially for the gestures, but mostly b/c of the UI customizations it offers.

 

[QueBert]

Curious, what exactly do you detest about stock Android?

Stock launcher's fugly, stock notification pulldown's fugly, don't like the default icons. Don't like the look of the built in caller id screen. Not a huge fan of the stock contacts app, same with the calendar. And the lack of customization without downloading a thousand apps from the Playstore and spending 20 hours modding it's very meh. And even with that route there's still a lot I can't change. I understand a lot of people love the stock Android experience, for me it's not an option. I like PACrom, Paranoid Android, MIUI & now Carbonrom. And since I always buy devices like the HTC One which have crazy support on XDA I'll never have to worry about running vanilla Android.