Something I've noticed but too shy to ask, until now

[Jim 777]

Yeah, blame it on the drinks.

with all the pictures of people's droids and the different ROMs they're running (it seems every day there's a new ROM I hadn't read about yet) I wonder really whats the REAL difference between them?

I mean, at the bottom of the home screen there's a handle for the app drawer, the notification bar may be a bit different, the theme may be somewhat unique (but once rooted you can change that yourself) and maybe the boot animation is different (but again that too can be customized at user level).

For those of you who have been following along, you know that I'm not trying to be negative here, but I found that of the ROMs I've tried, when I was done theming them to my liking, I couldn't see a difference on the surface. Just a stability variance where now I'm running the most stable of my experience. I find that with all the ROMs showing up I have absolutely no desire to try others. I thought I was just happy with I have but it's also that I don't see anything in the other ROMs that makes me say, "Damn! I got have that one!"

Your input?

[ldimick]

Yeah, blame it on the drinks.

with all the pictures of people's droids and the different ROMs they're running (it seems every day there's a new ROM I hadn't read about yet) I wonder really whats the REAL difference between them?

I mean, at the bottom of the home screen there's a handle for the app drawer, the notification bar may be a bit different, the theme may be somewhat unique (but once rooted you can change that yourself) and maybe the boot animation is different (but again that too can be customized at user level).

For those of you who have been following along, you know that I'm not trying to be negative here, but I found that of the ROMs I've tried, when I was done theming them to my liking, I couldn't see a difference on the surface. Just a stability variance where now I'm running the most stable of my experience. I find that with all the ROMs showing up I have absolutely no desire to try others. I thought I was just happy with I have but it's also that I don't see anything in the other ROMs that makes me say, "Damn! I got have that one!"

Your input?

In may cases your observation is right on. One of the problems with some of the ROMS is the method of altering existing ROMs. Rather than recompiling the code they are applying patches. In some cases patching works fine but in some other cases it introduces a whole set of other problems. Without being able to look at the source some of the 'cookers' could be introducing something that changes the logic. You never know when someone will make a weird change that breaks something that is not obvious.

For example: When VZW released their NFL app the way that they restricted the availability to just VZW customers was to read the part of the main screen that says POWERED BY. By changing that little string to the name of the ROM the app no longer functioned.

Imagine what happens when a second or third generation of that same alteration is propagated.

For this reason I try to stay with ROMS that have been built form source code or by people who are working closely with those types of developers.

[zathus]

you make a good point and I agree with you for the most part. to me, theres only 3 real orginal roms (and by orginal I dont mean the first, but the first roms to work well)that were built from the sourse code. thats Bugless beast, Droid Mod and Cyanogen. while Cyanogen was more or less ported over to the droid by Koush, its still original type rom to me. and all 3 of these roms do run differnt on the droid. Im not a dev nor anything close so I couldnt tell you what those small changes are but there there. then the other 200 roms or so out there lol are more or less hybrids of those 3 basic roms.

I guess I look at all these roms as american car companys. BB, DM and Cyan are like Ford Chevy and dodge. then roms like UD, SS and so on are like Pontiac, Jeep and on and on. every single car from any of these companys will do what there ment to do, wich is go from point A to point B. differnces are look, feel and preformance. same with Roms.

[verian]

I think It's just the little things that most don't notice. What scripts are available, 180 vs 360 rotation, what scripts are available, stuff like that.