Summary
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Google deliberately left the trees of the Pixel device from Android 16, making custom Rome growing very difficult.
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Developers now face challenges such as reverse engineering and potential hardware components, which break on custom Rome.
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Google’s innings in the direction of using “cutalfish” as primary reference targets can negatively affect long -term device support.
Custom Rome is not something that I think a lot when I get a new phone – you can read some of my thoughts here. But if you have a pixel phone, and you were expecting it to keep it on after being dead in the end, then we have some bad news for you.
Android 16 was eventually released into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which means that developers can use through the final Android release and bring it to non-pixel devices. However, the device trees and driver binergies for pixel devices cannot be seen anywhere. Google’s VP and GM of Android, Seang Chau, confirmed that this change is actually, deliberately. He said that “AOSP requires a reference target that is flexible, configured and inexpensive – independent of any particular hardware, including people from Google.” He removed the rumors that the AOSP was going away due to this change, being considered a “first step” towards closing it by some people, but went to add that the pixel device’s trees were intentionally lapse.
The Google Pixel device trees being essentially closed source are bad news for any pixel, which has got Android 16, or at least bad news on them that wanted to install a custom ROM on them. Although it is possible to bring a custom Rome on those pixel devices, it is now quite a difficult task. Developers looking to port a custom ROM for a pixel device will have to resort to reverse engineering and “blind estimate”. They will need to work with older devices trees and documentation, and hope they can find out how to get their software to work with the phone’s hardware.
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This custom adds several degree complexity to Rome developers, and usually a relatively simple examination can now be used in weeks or months. And there is a real possibility that some hardware components or features can be permanently demolished on custom Rome. Features that depend on heavy customized drivers, such as advanced camera functioning, can be difficult to apply especially completely.
The company has said that it is moving towards using a virtual device, which is named “Cutlefish”, its primary reference target for AOSP development. The purpose of this step is to make AOSP development more hardware-ignorant. But for those of you who want to keep their devices on for a long time, this can be terrible news. Thankfully, most new pixel phones give you at least seven years of updates, so despite the fact that custom ROM support is now on subdivision, your phone should continue working for a least long time.
Source: Seenag Chow (Twitter/X), Android authority
