You know what I would really love? A custom rom browser.

yokonzo@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 49 points –

Imagine it, not a repo, but a site or app that lets you "try out" custom roms through an embedded or emulated interface.

It's such a hassle downloading and installing every rom out there to see how they feel and function, it would be nice to be able to take them out for test drives. I think this could be theoretically possible, several bluestack emulators for the most popular custom roms emulated as an instance of mostly just the lock and home screen with a few dummy apps, kind of like how things are set up in a phone shop.

Unfortunately I'm not quite skilled enough to set something like this up, and I'm sure the server hosting would be a bit of a financial burden but I think this is a cool, albeit, unlikely idea.

7

I like that idea.

Swapping custom ROMs are the distro hopping of Android.

What I do to make the process faster is:

  • Backup all my shit, with Google backup (which if it works, it is way crippled) and Swift backup root.
  • Download newer ROM and desired root method (KSU as of lately).
  • Flash said ROM and root it.
  • Grab data from Google, give root permissions to Swift Backup and complete the data retrieval sane edition.
  • Rinse and repeat.

My device is EOL and most custom ROMs come decrypted by default, so I am in no need to format data, which just makes this process faster as my data remains in the same folder, but if you have a good cloud solution and nice internet speed Swift Backup can take advantage of that.

this would be... somewhat possible, you can't really boot GSI images, however the folk at BlissOS do have an android generic project that makes porting custom roms to x86 a lot easier. By porting android images to generic x86, we can serve them as temporary VMs, just like https://distrosea.com/ (I've actually been thinking about doing something like this for bliss specifically but funding says no lol).

This is contingent on roms being ported to x86 though, off the top of my head there are images floating around for

  • Bliss (Obviously)
  • Lineage OS,
  • Vanilla AOSP,

and specific verisons of

  • Project sakura (A11 iirc)
  • CarbonROM A10
  • Bootleggers A10
  • RessurectionRemix
  • Pixel Experience
  • Dirty Unicorns
  • Tesla

I believe there are also images of LMODroid and Calyx floating around... somewhere

Total noob here but wouldn't it be possible to have an ARM device stream the content to your browser? So you got a viewport of a compatible device that shows you how it would look like?

True parity would be impossible without porting it to x86, but that would give you a glimpse if the UX is decent enough

sure thats portable, but you would need a lot of devices for that

I see, so this would be something that would be dependant on the rom developers or an interested third party to do the actual work of porting to x86.

So essentially it would be a "if you build it, they will hopefully also build it" situation