Custom Roms

[Guest Arival]

I'd had my Hero for at least 6 months before i discovered custom rom's and the improvements that the community had made to the phone's software - this was when HTC was still dragging its heals over the release of new software and was generally proving pretty useless. I assumed that the reason people like Paul had managed to do such a sterling job compared to HTC was because they had given up on the hero as a legacy project already and moved on to pastures new - they certainly didn't seem very interested in bringing new versions of android to the phone so it stood to reason that given time, intelligent developers could do a good job in their stead.

I'd not really looked into the development of roms for any other phone, so i didn't appreciate that these kinds of improvement are wholesale across nearly every phone, often within days of their release.

This seems odd to me, as i don't understand how LG have managed to deploy the resources of a multi-national corporation to spend 6 months designing a phone and optimizing its software, only for a single developer to improve on it within days, working part time, for free, and without half of the tools available to the 'professionals'. This is a brand new flagship phone, not even properly released in most places, so i would have thought that every effort would have gone into ensuring that things such as using the ext4 filesystem would have been thought through.

Obviously the easy answer is that Paul and the guys at Cyanogemod/XDA are just simply geniuses, and it seems weird that given the consistent ability that developers show when it comes to improving these devices, that a big company such as LG doesn't make half of them offers they can't refuse to do it full time for them, because unless I'm missing something they're a lot better at it :s

Is it a case of all of these companies just being crap at their jobs, the work flow of a large company being a hindrance to smart software design, too many rigorous checks in place to roll out big changes quickly(given the bugs some phones are released with i find that hard to believe) or something else I'm totally missing?

[Guest djmcnz]

I'd had my Hero for at least 6 months before i discovered custom rom's and the improvements that the community had made to the phone's software - this was when HTC was still dragging its heals over the release of new software and was generally proving pretty useless. I assumed that the reason people like Paul had managed to do such a sterling job compared to HTC was because they had given up on the hero as a legacy project already and moved on to pastures new - they certainly didn't seem very interested in bringing new versions of android to the phone so it stood to reason that given time, intelligent developers could do a good job in their stead.

I'd not really looked into the development of roms for any other phone, so i didn't appreciate that these kinds of improvement are wholesale across nearly every phone, often within days of their release.

This seems odd to me, as i don't understand how LG have managed to deploy the resources of a multi-national corporation to spend 6 months designing a phone and optimizing its software, only for a single developer to improve on it within days, working part time, for free, and without half of the tools available to the 'professionals'. This is a brand new flagship phone, not even properly released in most places, so i would have thought that every effort would have gone into ensuring that things such as using the ext4 filesystem would have been thought through.

Obviously the easy answer is that Paul and the guys at Cyanogemod/XDA are just simply geniuses, and it seems weird that given the consistent ability that developers show when it comes to improving these devices, that a big company such as LG doesn't make half of them offers they can't refuse to do it full time for them, because unless I'm missing something they're a lot better at it :s

Is it a case of all of these companies just being crap at their jobs, the work flow of a large company being a hindrance to smart software design, too many rigorous checks in place to roll out big changes quickly(given the bugs some phones are released with i find that hard to believe) or something else I'm totally missing?

I think the main ingredient you're overlooking is testing. Whereas Paul et al are happy to release beta/test software, manufacturers and carriers are not. If any dev/chef/cook applied the testing cycles that manufacturers and carriers did we'd get stuff in months, not days.