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Does This Count?

Ooo I hate it when you guys rub my nose in Android fragmentation! Bullies. But some big news hit the Android world late last night, that Gingerbread (the latest Android phone OS) is available for thirty phones and it’s stable. The catch, it’s a custom rom. Gotta root and unlock your bootloader.

But still, in the Android world, unlike WP7, my people for whatever reason tend to have fun getting under the hood of their phone. And this custom rom, it’s not a single chef, it’s a franchise, a team with a community of its own behind it, a brand, prolific, reliable, mysteriously badass. And popular as hell. As for voiding your warranty or whatever, I have returned my share of phones over the years without even bothering to restore them to stock (winmo) and AT&T either didn’t give a shit or their warranty department isn’t full of XDA-sniffing bloodhounds. Really, the thing’s more stable than the stock rom and, other than having to install it rather than it being on your phone out of the box, there are no deficits versus its stock counterparts.

So given that this is the latest and greatest Android you can put on your phone (if it’s one of the thirty devices on the list) and given its popularity (its name reveals millions of google hits and its XDA Nexus One thread has two million views), given that everyone who’s used it considers this to be as stable as stock roms (but better) even the nightlies, also given that the large group of people involved in its development collectively decided to call last nights mega release Stable, to me that makes it for my people a de facto viable option that’s not just for the extremely obsessed nerds among us, so would this qualify in your mind as progress in the battle against fragmentation? A non-event? Making the situation worse? It’s a good question.

Man you guys are mean sometimes, the way you swarm around me and spit on my self esteem.

Doug Simmons

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