- 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.
purposefully. they dont want you messing with their device. its that simple.
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).
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.
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.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
Phones by and large are seen as a locked system: you specifically choose to buy Android or iOS and stick with that.
There’s really no incentive for companies to make different OS installs easy. I’d say there’s plenty of reasons not to: do you really want to give the average user that much power to fuck up their phone? I assume there’s also some security implications if they made it too easy to fiddle with.
So yeah, it’s difficult because you’re fiddling with something that wasn’t meant to be an end-user thing in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they made phones much more open in terms of hardware and software, but the big guys aren’t going to do it.
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).
