Why are custom ROM's so fast

[whatiam]

Custom roms for the magic and dream are so much faster than the stock ones, but they add more features and are developed by people without access to proprietary drivers. How can this be? Could Droid roms be fast?

 

[zudien]

Coming from WinMo. A Custom Rom was fast because the developer slashed a lot of the bloatware and services that were unneeded. They would also optomize and include the latest fixes and updates to WinMo.

As for the droid. I am entirely unfamilar with Android OS and I assume that 1.5/6 rom (i am assuming you mean cynogen) is incorporating fixes and cutting out the unneccessary software.

I would be interested to hear more from an Android developer on this and the type of optomization Android allows.

Either way, how much faster do you want your droid to be? This **** is already blazin.

 

[praeceps]

It's the skill of the hackers. Yes, the Droid could be far faster. It's processor is ridiculous so it could possibly be obscene. They dissect the parts and bit by bit figure things out and redo it themselves.

 

[whatiam]

How come a large amount of motorola/verizon/google people can't do that in the first place?

 

[tu3218]

yeah I also came from winmo an the roms were sooo much better then stock roms. Is this a big thing with android? it seemed like new roms on winmo were very popular but is it the same with the android platform?

 

[praeceps]

It's just that Verizon hasn't had an Android phone until now. Give 'em time. It takes real work to do this.

 

[zudien]

Well because it's just that...the Phone has to go through so many different hands before it gets to the end user each maybe not talking to each other as clearly as they would like.

This phone is very well put together. The coding is solid and it seems to be the apps that cause the instability (as with most operating systems in general).

People develop roms when the phone sucks. WinMo is a prime example. Each carrier would load so much bloatware on there that it was obscene. The Rom's were basically stripped down version from builds of WinMo with the other stuff on top.

Typically ROMs don't have any special coding. Some maybe but not a lot. However with Android being an open platform it easy to troubleshoot the bugs and memory leaks and latency problems.

Remember the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Eventually there will be a push for more features. In the mean time there isn't enough to be done to warrant a reflash...

 

[TekHawk]

Dream & Magic? are those HTC if they are no sence UI to bog you down with the custom rom would be my guess

 

[Mojo]

Developers that are creating ROMS are not bound by guide lines, policy's, and rules of the carriers. So they can work to optimize the ROMS to work by tweeking things, cutting stuff out etc.. that normally the manufacture could not.

 

[Laurence5905]

It's just that Verizon hasn't had an Android phone until now. Give 'em time. It takes real work to do this.

Agreed -- the Droid has already had one update that improved several functions. Sped them up, I mean. And it uses way less battery power when it's idle now, too. It's just a matter of time -- they'll optimize the hell out of this phone's software. The future of this phone is very bright.

 

[LifeIsABeach]

There is a hack which allows you to put Android 2.1 on your Droid and supposedly is much quicker than 2.0 (I say supposedly only because I have not done it myself - I have no reason not to believe them). Hopefully this will be part of the January update.

 

[boatman2220]

A few more revisions of the OS and a little more time for people to fool around with it. Then there'll be reason to start looking at different ROM. Right now I don't have a reason to change. A little further down the road will be a different story.

 

[928Droid]

Dream & Magic? are those HTC if they are no sence UI to bog you down with the custom rom would be my guess

I asume the Sense UI must slow them down, my wife's HTC Eris is agonizingly slow compared to my Droid. I know it doesnt have as fast a processor as the Droid and it is running 1.5, but geez it takes so long to do things sometimes I wonder if I actualy hit the button.

Ironically one way I did make it faster was to remove the HTC FLip Clock and weather Widget and instead used the old version of Beautiful Widgets Clock/Weather and it reponds much faster with weather animations and the animations are also much better.