Custom ROMs still have their place on Android phones

Installing custom ROMs on Android phones serves several purposes. ROMs may offer more features than the standard software that comes with your phone. Using an up-to-date ROM can be essential if you are using an aging device with minimal or no software support. Or maybe you just long for something different.

However, based on our readers’ opinion, which we collected in our most recent poll, the majority of our readers were never or no longer interested in these things. See the results below.

Are you using custom ROMs on your Android device?

Results

This was a very popular poll that received over 7,000 responses on our website and many more on Twitter and YouTube. All three platforms also gave very different results.

Let’s start with our website. Just under 35% of readers currently use ROMs on their devices. 39.1% admit that they “sooner” but no longer. After all, just over a quarter of voters say they have never used custom ROMs. Remarkably, this means that almost three out of four Android Authority readers have played with ROMs at some point.

We saw almost 5,000 votes on Twitter. A much larger proportion of voters (38%) on this platform have never tried ROMs, while 16.6% currently operate devices with them. That leaves just over 45% of voters who gave up on ROMs after trying them in the past.

Finally we come to YouTube. The majority (46%) of our audience admits they have never tried custom ROMs. 40% have tried them in the past while 14% are currently using a custom ROM. This results from over 16,000 votes.

To sum up, the vast majority of our readers have looked at custom ROMs before, but no longer because of software improvements, issues with Google’s new security features, or the general annoyance. A little more than one in five readers is still using a custom ROM.

Your comments

• Varusal: Not anymore, because most apps, especially finance apps, don’t work (thanks to SafetyNet).
• Boni M: I’ve installed a lot of custom ROMs in my older devices for almost 10 years, but these days I don’t see the need for them anymore. Most OEM ROMs are customizable, and Android has matured in many ways.
• SanBlarnoi: I mainly use them because I want monthly security patches and a clean, bloatware-free UI with the hardware of my choice.
• roaduardo: I used to be a flashaholic. But bootloaders can get locked down pretty tight these days and then there are the finance apps that (for good reason) don’t work. Has security become more important to me with increasing age? I don’t want to dig into the software guts of my phone like that anymore. But it was a fun hobby.
• Seela: I only use them when the OEM has stopped supporting my device.
• Kean: I am using custom ROMs for devices that the OEM has discontinued support. This could add many years to the useful life of the phone, especially if the device is officially supported by LineageOS.
• Achyut Arjun: Custom ROMs are like a necessity for me because I hate how OEMs take forever to upgrade the phones, and some custom ROMs also offer a much cleaner and ad-free Android experience.
• YT Cast: I don’t root them because they seem too complicated, but I’m so in love with the OnePlus 8T that I think I’ll try rooting it to get OS updates.
• Arun Udayakumar: Used custom ROMs on every Android phone I’ve owned.

That’s it for this custom ROM survey. Thanks for voting and commenting. Any other thoughts on the results or custom ROMs? Make sure to put them down below.