- Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
- flash a recovery.img,
- load into recovery mode (which, depending on the phone, might need extra work)
- wipe some caches,
- select new os/rom image,
- pray it doesn’t brick your phone.
You’d think someone would’ve learned a thing or two from the easy graphical installations linux and even windows have been offering since the late 2000s.
purposefully. they dont want you messing with their device. its that simple.
“Their”?
ha, you werent under the impression you were buying a device, were ya?
youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
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Less tinfoil in my take: a good reason there doesn’t exist other OSs is a lack of drivers and support for hardware. Good luck getting your screen to work if it’s proprietary to the manufacturer and device. Can’t communicate with the ASICs if they don’t use standard protocols, etc.
This was a big issue back when I was involved in the LG G Flex 2 community and I can assume it only got worse since then.
PCs are a bit different IMO since generic drivers might get you pretty far. Even then, support for modern graphics cards (for example) would be near impossible without the manufacturers playing nice or in-depth insider knowledge
For many reasonable vendors, this process is very unlikely to brick your phone, and requires minimal effort to unlock the bootloader or load/change the recovery.
However, many phone vendors (Xiaomi was the one example I know) subsidize phone price with data surveillance and ads; so they don’t want users to use other OS, as it hurts their revenue.
Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
A few years ago, there were huge issues with reseller unlocking the bootloader to inject ads on the phones they sold, which forced many android phone manufacturers to add online verification with long wait time to prevent bulk unlock.
That may be an excuse they used, but I doubt that was really their motivation.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
Phones by and large are seen as a locked system: you specifically choose to buy Android or iOS and stick with that.
There’s really no incentive for companies to make different OS installs easy. I’d say there’s plenty of reasons not to: do you really want to give the average user that much power to fuck up their phone? I assume there’s also some security implications if they made it too easy to fiddle with.
So yeah, it’s difficult because you’re fiddling with something that wasn’t meant to be an end-user thing in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they made phones much more open in terms of hardware and software, but the big guys aren’t going to do it.
That doesn’t really make sense. Every paragraph, except the 2nd, also applies to PCs, yet you can install a different OS.
The reason is quite simple: more money from users.
PCs aren’t phones -They have different expectations and histories.
Would you ever consider buying individual parts, and building your own gaming phone?
The end result is still the same: Less consumer power,.
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GrapheneOS is a very easy install and can be done simply by plugging your phone in and clicking some buttons on the browser.
Only if your phone is a Pixel, which isn’t available in my country
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grapheneos is only available for pixel phones
and only specific ones at that. not all of them from what i recall.
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There are a lot of reasons here which are correct, but one huge Factor when I was working with custom roms was the fact that the actual underlying hardware driver and firmware were a black box. Generally speaking you would need to harvest the binary files that made things like the camera, gps, and/or touchscreen work. Sometimes it wasnt too hard if you were going from one android skin to another that used the same underlining operating system, but if you wanted to make serious changes, and the phone manufacturer wasn’t great at sharing, it could take a very long time to figure out what data needed to be passed to the camera to make it turn on and be available to use. What got even worse is if you wanted to upgrade your android version (5 to 6 lets say), where android made serious changes under the hood, you ran the risk of having these blobs not even work with the system. They would expect something that android no longer passed or provided. Or they were using some deprecated API to make their function a accessable. It just became impossible to do without being able to recompile the binary only portions that weren’t subject to the gpl. As android has gotten more security conscious it has made things even more complicated.
The web-based installer for GrapheneOS is very easy to use. The catch is that it only works for Pixel phones (and only those that are still receiving updates).
I can’t answer your question, but is quite unfortunate. It really shortens the lifespan of many phones as they stop receiving OS and security updates after awhile (and in many cases, right away).
