Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is a great operating system, for the most part. When manufacturers start tweaking it to make their Android devices look different than other Android devices, then things start going to hell. Take HTC Sense for example. I know that some of you like it, but every time I see that stupid analog clock and weather widget I feel as if I need to fly to Taiwan and slap Peter Chou in the face. Here’s where custom Android ROMs come in. Don’t like how you phone looks? Just root your device, slap a ROM on there, and boom, no more hideous color schemes and useless animations. CyanogenMod is easily the most popular Android ROM that’s floating around the internets. The thing is, since Android 4.0 is so different than Android 2.3, the CyanogenMod folks had to practically rewrite their ROM from scratch. So here we are, roughly seven months after the source code to Android 4.0 was released, and CyanogenMod is finally making a release candidate version of their Android 4.0 based ROM available for all to download.
Now while I love that CyanogenMod and other ROM makers are out there, I’m still clinging to the belief that they should have never existed in the first place. If Google simply grew a pair and forced handset makers to not mess up their work, then no one would have to put up with TouchWIZ or Sense or TimeScape or MotoBLUR or whatever the hell LG calls their thing. Later today Google is going to show off Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The Galaxy Nexus, a device that runs stock Android, will get it first and it’ll be untarnished. How long until it hits the Android 4.0 devices already out on the market? That’s a question that sadly no one knows the answer to.
Yet another reason not to mess with stock Android, it delays updates.
[Via: The Verge]