ROM

The Samsung Galaxy S8 and its larger Galaxy S8+ sibling are arguably two of the best-looking, and best-performing smartphones this half of the year. But as great as they are, they are by no means perfect. Even the Samsung faithful will admit, sometimes begrudgingly, that the Korean OEM can be a wee too "generous" when it comes to the extras, a.k.a. the cruft and bloat, inside the smartphone user experience or UX. If you're feeling adventurous, there are a couple of Android custom ROMs available for these devices to set you free from the clutches of TouchWiz (or now "Grace") and of Samsung's bloat.

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Last week Jide made an announcement that had a familiar message. Following the likes of Microsoft Continuum and Ubuntu Convergence, its Remix Singularity project wanted to turn the very same Android smartphone and apps that you keep in your pocket into the PC that you’ll use on your desktop. Jide is hardly the first nor the only one who has made such an attempt. At MWC 2017, French company Auxens has revealed an alpha version of its OXI ROM that does that as well, with a little less polish but a bit more device support.

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This morning the official LineageOS Gerrit was published for developers to contribute to, continuing the work of the open source community on CyanogenMod. Cyanogen - the brand-named company - will continue to operate on its own, separate from the Android software that's transforming into LineageOS (or Lineage OS, or just Lineage, if you prefer). Developers are hard at work now turning the next version of CyanogenMod into the first version of LineageOS.

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The Nexus 5 isn’t going to receive an official Android 7.0 Nougat update. Whether that’s because the smartphone has reached its end of life or because Qualcomm won’t release updated drivers for its chipset hardly matters for owners of what is perhaps the most loved Nexus smartphone. Hope springs eternal, however, at least for those who are willing to take the plunge and take the necessary steps towards Nougat. An AOSP-based Android 7.0 ROM is now available for the device and it seems that almost everything is working perfectly.

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The Android OS is known for being very open and flexible to the point that dozens of third-party Android versions, called ROMs, have been developed. That said, Android is setup in such a way that one device can really only boot into one Android system at a time, making it difficult, though not impossible, to juggle different ROMs on a single device. That, however, might be thing of the past as there is a chance that the upcoming Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones can actually dual boot two Android systems with less risk than before.

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The official OxygenOS for OnePlus "won't be a community build, it will be a real OS." So says OnePlus ROM team member Helen, an official member of said team. In return, the Android community has been none too kind to the creators of said operating system and said hardware. Cyanogenmod's own Steve Kondik suggested the following: "you can love CM or you can hate us, but we have no plans of taking our toys and going home." This is OnePlus after Cyanogenmod - and it's none too pretty.

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In the wake of their odd breakup (or separation, or maybe they’re taking a break, who really knows) with Cyanogen, OnePlus announced they’d come to market with their own operating system. Quickly dubbed Oxygen OS, we were promised more details at a later date. Today is the day for more details, so what are we getting? A look at Oxygen OS’ logo, and a brief introduction to the team building it. If you were wondering how OnePlus was going to answer Cyanogen’s work on their hardware, the answer is Paranoid Android.

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OnePlus is definitely one company that will want to leave behind the problems of 2014 and look forward to the opportunities of 2015. In trying to start the year right, the Chinese startup is giving its fans a rather small taste of what is to come, specifically, the new custom ROM that it will be developing independent of its former partner Cyanogen. Though still bare and unexciting, this new ROM brings the promise of two things: Android Lollipop for the OnePlus One as well as a new user experience for its owners.

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This afternoon the team at Cyanogen Inc. have made clear their intention to launch the CyanogenMod Installer to Google Play for Android. This app will made the CyanogenMod Project a reality in as simple a manner possible for users of Android who wish to work with a unique user interface for their Android device. Unlike most "launchers", this app installs the CyanogenMod ROM, effectively an operating system replacement for Android devices, top to bottom.

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Android as an operating system is a wide open environment ripe for modification by the likes of developers from all angles, including those from the group Paranoid Android. These folks have announced this week a release of a bit of code that'll allow 3rd party software makers to take advantage of the newest Google Android apps on the market, even for those Android builds not approved by Google. In effect, this is a setup Google would not approve of in and of itself as their whole profit model (for Android) is built around approving Android-toting devices for use with the Google Play app and media store.

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Amid the release of the newly-minted CyanogeMod-friendly OPPO N1 smartphone reveal just last week, SlashGear took the time to have a chat with none other than the company's own founder Steve Kondik on the immediate future of the company. While the OPPO N1 isn't even off the shelves yet internationally, Cyanogen Inc. as a company took the opportunity almost immediately after seeing a friendly round of investment (of $7 million USD just this past month) to team up with OPPO, an up-and-coming hardware company in and of themselves - in a move that they hope will help them prove to a larger audience what they're capable of in optimizing hardware on a brand-to-brand collaboration basis.

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While the official Google Glass team is embroiled in a bit of controversy over which apps will and wont be allowed on the device's official build this week, the folks behind ClockworkMod Recovery push forward with a new release for hacking the device. As it is on Android, so too does this software allow for a user-friendly look at the back end of the Explorer Edition of Google Glass, the iteration being pushed by developer Brint Kriebel (aka bekit) this week allowing for access with the just-updated Google Glass XE6 build.

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