Custom Android ROM Developers Get OTA Update Capabilities Like Carriers

hypnosec writes "A new service dubbed OTA Update Center has been launched that enables Android ROM developers to provide over-the-air (OTA) updates of their ROMs in a centralized and easy fashion. Custom ROM developers had very little at their disposal when it came to providing updates and when any user with such a ROM did want to apply an update, he/she was required to reinstall the new ROM from scratch, which often involved deletion of the backup, installation of the new ROM, and restoration of data. This was a lengthy process and often a deterrent when it came to updating the ROM. Also, the developers were required to have their own infrastructure whereby they would be required to host their own servers and have the required bandwidth to serve scores of downloads. The OTA Update Center changes this and provides a free-to-use service that is easy and noob-friendly to use."

Goo Anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Goo.im does the same thing, it seems to work fine and have lots of standard roms in it.

Re:

[NoEvidenZ]

Yeah, this doesn't look like much of an improvement over Goo.im
Now if it worked the same way as official OTA updates, that would be exciting.

noon-friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

they are having a problem with that time slot?

Re:

[Megahard]

That means you can do an update with one hand while holding your lunch in the other.

ClockworkdMod

[ep0niks]

Same thing as ClockworkdMod Developer, http://developer.clockworkmod.com/ [clockworkmod.com] Register, upload your ROM, hosted and pushed via ROM Manager on devices..

Re:ClockworkdMod

[Alex Zepeda]

Yeah, except CWM is closed source, ad laden crapware with a penchant for bricking some phones.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

CWM (recovery) is great. The ROM Manager application is the ass-sucking part.

Re:

[petteyg359]

Except that ROM Manager can't actually flash the ROM, and it sucks ass.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It can flash a flashable rom, and has been able to since the beginning. Perhaps going to recovery mode, selecting update rom then the zip file is too difficult for you? Me thinks so...

Re:

[jez9999]

BTW, can anyone tell me what's up with the CWM main page [clockworkmod.com]? It seems to have no information whatsoever on the ClockworkMod Recovery thing, which is surely a major feature of ClockworkMod?

I didn't know

[kyrio]

I didn't know that updating your ROM at noon time was more difficult than any other time.

Incremental updates?

[ahow628]

I would be highly interested if I could download incremental updates (patches?). Who wants to download 70-600mb of data for every nightly?

Re:

[Artifex]

I would be highly interested if I could download incremental updates (patches?). Who wants to download 70-600mb of data for every nightly?

The size for me isn't such a factor -- at least up to about 300M or so, at which point it becomes a time suck to do often. What keeps me from doing any nightlies is having to wipe& reinstall. I use so many registered services that it's very annoying to redo their apps every time, even if I'm just cutting and pasting from the 1Password app. And yes, I do have Titanium Backup Pro, but it's not a good idea to recover all data across releases, even point ones.

Re:

[hey_popey]

How exactly do you manage to do that? I change update CM9 nightlies with CWM. No wipe is needed [xda-developers.com] at all. Not a single app login is lost during the process! The only thing I need to setup again is the avast anti theft service.

Re:

[cawpin]

Me too. I have CM9 on my Touchpad and have updated to a new nightly release about 25 times and never had any issues at all. In fact, it has been less painful than updating my previous phones to official releases.

Re:

[Artifex]

My nightlies are from another developer, not one of the Cyanomod family. That's how :)

Re:

[Kufat]

You really don't need to wipe and reinstall as often as they say you do. I recently upgraded from CM7 to a CM9 kang without wiping anything except cache and only had to reinstall a few apps. (That said, sometimes you'll end up with a non-working mess and will have to wipe anyway...but it's very rarely necessary for point release or nightly upgrades.)

Re:

[Artifex]

The zips for the nightlies for the ROMs I use (not Cyanogen) usually auto-wipe.

Re:

[ahow628]

I usually wipe once every week or two on nightlies unless I'm getting a lot of force closes or reboots. For me, the downloads are the biggest time (and battery) suck. I'm not on Sense on my Evo LTE anymore, but the base rom is about 550mb. That is huge.

Re:

[Artifex]

Wow, that is huge. When I use a Sense-based ROM on my Inspire 4G, it's usually 3-400M. When I tried ICS out for a while, it was under 200, I'm pretty sure.
Wonder if that ROM's got a bunch of extra stuff in it like third party browsers, etc.?

Re:

[ahow628]

Sense is a bloated beast. Sense roms are about 550, as I said. AOSP (CM10) is 150. HTC is the worst.

Re:

[compro01]

As long as you're not shifting to a different base version or bug hunting, there's generally no need to wipe the data partition.

Re:

[VortexCortex]

If one can do OTA updates, then it isn't ROM is it?

What are these people thinking? Are they intentionally misrepresenting their products? Or have the figured out how to do matter teleportation over standard carrier networks?

ROM - Read Only Memory. You can't push your phone's firmware back into the cloud, only read it from their cloud ergo, it's ROM.

Re:

[muffen]

This might help: http://simply-android.wikia.com/wiki/Dictionary [wikia.com]

Re:

[somersault]

Uh.. not really. It's more just a word left over from when ROM actually was ROM. It originally was a part of the Operating System that was held on a read-only chip. Even when devices' "ROM" started to become updatable, we still call it ROM, because we're silly like that.

Re:

[VortexCortex]

That-Is-Amazing (TIA)

Oh This Again - (OTA)

Re:

[silanea]

[...] Seriously, do you really want to be pushed an update that is probably untested and just hope for the best? We're not talking AT&T or T-Mo here [...]

Well, we were just a sentence ago... Seriously, it was Samsung's official updates that drove me to CyanogenMod.

Deletion of backup?

[leromarinvit]

Delete your backups before any major change that might go wrong - it's just too boring otherwise!

Great...

[DNS-and-BIND]

ROM developers are among the worst at documenting how to install their ROMs. The guides - and I've read a bunch - all assume the user is a fellow developer. They read like notes an experienced man wrote to himself so he doesn't forget how to do something. Consider yourself lucky if the author uses capitalization and smooth sentences instead of "textspeak" and run-on sentences. You'll get gems like "Please make sure that gfree_verify returns secu_flag = 0 before following this steps!!!" without bothering

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then perhaps you should use the stock rom and not be doing this anyway?
Just saying...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then perhaps you should use the stock rom and not be doing this anyway?

Perhaps if Google made root priveleges a check-box capability then that would be an option.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be nice? Google letting you have control over something you purchased, or more to the point, Google not designing it so that you DON'T, and stopped doing their level best to ensure that you CAN'T get that control? I've heard it whispered that Google did this so phone companies would buy phones from manufacturers that use a system that doesn't let you do whatever you want with what you thought was YOUR phone. That is, if Google did not do this, phone manufacturers would not have used Android

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

No, because the stock ROM drains the battery in a day and is slow as hell.

Re:

[wolrahnaes]

You need to look at better ROMs and ignore the crap.

What I've observed from having a few Android devices over the last few years is that in general stock-based ROMs are garbage. Each device typically has one or two developers who actually care about making a clean, functional ROM while sticking to the OEM-provided software where possible for stability reasons. Fresh is a good example of this on the HTC side of things. Unfortunately the vast majority of stock-based ROMs are made by kids who think l33tsp34

Google should really be doing this

[vawwyakr]

The facility to find and flash roms should be easy as easy to access as the app market in my opinion. Google is letting manufacturers and carrier ruin the system with their slow updates and locked in crap. If someone makes a JB rom for my phone I shouldn't have to spent hours trying to find it, and then figuring out how to get it on my phone without bricking it in the process. The instructions that are out there are terrible at best for the most part and risky to even try.

I know people will say stuff

Meh...

[nighthawk243]

It isn't that hard to download the updated Jellybro ROM, Franco kernel and then update it by dirty flashing it in recovery on my Galaxy Nexus. All I have to do is flash 3 zip files (ROM, Kernel, Gapps) and I'm done.