Custom Roms and the need for a custom rom index
You already know where the post will lead, it'll lead to some side project I ended up doing during the weekend. But, there's twist, this wasn't done on a weekend. I did it on a weekday and that's the only twist. Let's get to the post.
It all started with a general day at work, writing features, fighting bugs, with my brain just imagining me to be a super hero. Once I logged out, I just go sit with my parents and eat dinner or talk about random crap. During this I observed dad constantly patting the back of his phone like it was a TV Remote and hitting it would magically make it work.
I grabbed his phone and randomly started doing intensive tasks to see that the phone wasn't just slowing down but literally begging for resources to work properly. Shouldn't be happening to a decent phone but might just have been a faulty piece and my dad doesn't really tell me that it's not working cause then I'd instantly order a new one instead of trying to get it fixed.
Anyway, with the new knowledge that the king's telecommunications weren't working, the prince went ahead to look for another phone and I remembered that I could just swap the current ROM with a custom one to see if it's the hardware or it's the software optimizations that are causing the issue. I reset the phone, the phone still hanged itself to death and then came back to life after 2-3 mins. Pretty irritating!
I then went ahead with the Custom ROM approach to find out that the phone doesn't support bootloader unlocking and I can't do anything but stare into darkness with this in my hand. Next Steps?
Look for a phone that's fairly new like released last year and has at least one of 3 of my favorite roms.
- Lineage
- Pixel Experience
- Evolution X
Sadly, there's no way to combine those 2 searches so I ended up going through each of their websites, looked up the devices they support and the release date of each device. Luckily each of those roms have websites that provide all the information I needed but it was way too many clicks and that makes sense cause their audience is people who already own the phone , searching if their phone is supported.
Not people who plan to buy a phone only if it's supported by these 3. I sat for a few minutes doing this and making note of all the phone I've checked , their release timelines, the stability of the ROM and then I was like, "Dude... you are a programmer. Script this out!" , wrote a simple script that could scrape the lineageOS wiki and device release data and show it in the descending order and I could easily just select the device I could get for Dad.
Brain didn't really like the idea of a cli script and went "You know, you can build a website right?". The remaining story doesn't need to be explained. Ended up building https://cri.reaper.im and it has about 5 ROMs and the devices that support them. Thus, making it as easy as a click to help me find what to buy.
Check it out, or don't , who cares? I'm going to go get Dad a Pixel 4a.