Custom ROM from Android
If you’re familiar with rooting your Android phone or downloading custom ROMs, such as the highly popular Cyanogen Mod or its successor Lineage OS, you may have wondered – how do people build these ROMs? How much work exactly goes into developing a customized ROM?
Build a Custom ROM from Android
This guide will guide you through the basics of developing your custom Android ROM. Keep in mind that this is a huge task: if you have little coding experience or Linux terminals, you might want to gain some knowledge of your credit before diving into this extreme. But if you have at least a basic idea of these things, I will try to explain them in the simplest way possible, so that you can follow them.
Now, what happens with AOSP is that pure source code does not include device-specific hardware properties. In simple terms, hardware like the camera and the GPU will not work "immediately" when developing with AOSP. In fact, your device won't boot even without these hardware binaries.
Some manufacturers have their own open source projects or release development tools for potential developers, while other manufacturers maintain strict control over their property codes. Here is a short list of open source projects from the most popular producers: Samsung Open Source
With this, we continue on the assumption that we are building a ROM for the most basic Android experience, for a Google Pixel device. With this knowledge to his credit, he will be able to expand on his own and start developing customized versions of ROMs from specific manufacturers.
Requirements for this Guide:
- Android Open Source Project
- Pixel XL phone or an Android emulator for Linux
- 64-bit Linux Operating System – Ubuntu or Linux Mint are the most newbie-friendly distros, whereas BBQLinux was developed specifically with Android developers in mind.
- Python
- A beefy computer (compiling code takes a lot of memory and space!)
Setting Up Your Build Environment
Head over to the Genymotion website, register an account, verify it through email, and download the executable to your Linux desktop.
Now open a Linux terminal, and type:
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