- 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.
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).
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.
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.
Look up the history of how Android was developed, particularly what happened when Google took control, and you will find your answer. Ofc if you want to help, feel free to be the change that you want to see in the world, I’m only talking here about the past, as you asked about.
TLDR version of that history: greedy corporations surprised everyone, somehow, by ultimately acting in a greedy manner. B-b-but their slogan was “Don’t be evil”! - once upon a time. And ofc Apple sure as hell wasn’t going to cooperate with that “nonsense” of allowing anyone to take even one step outside of their walled garden. So what then is left to us, besides what you see before you?
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.
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
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).
