Replacing Your Android Phone OS

2012-06-16

Jitesh Doshi

Replacing Your Android Phone OS

Overview of replacing Android OS with custom ROMs including boot loader unlocking and recovery installation.

If you have one of the Android-based smart phones then you might not be getting most out of it. That’s because the distribution of Android that it comes pre-installed with is unnecessarily bloated and crippled at the same time. You have the choice of installing a lighter and more capable distribution of Android.

Key Concepts:

  1. Custom ROMs - Your phone has an OS stored on flash ROM. A custom ROM is an alternative distribution of the OS as an installable image file.

  2. Boot loader - A program installed on your phone that the phone’s computer executes as the very first program - even before it loads the OS. The bootloader is also the first layer of security on your device.

  3. Unlocked boot loader - The boot loader that comes pre-installed on most phones is “locked” - meaning it doesn’t let you install and boot other OS’s. In order to replace your phone’s OS, you will need to unlock and replace the boot loader.

  4. Recovery - Smart phones have a special partition called “recovery” which let you restore the phone’s data, or OS to a previous state. Popular recoveries are Clockwork Mod (CWM) or TWRP.

Search for your device’s specific method on http://www.xda-developers.com/ forums.