I’d wager there’s a lot of you reading this who run custom ROMs on your Android phone or tablet, but only a tiny portion that actually develop your own. (Guilty.) The simple fact is that rooting and flashing a custom recovery/ROM is fairly simple for those of us that know our way around a command line, but cooking up an entire ROM requires some more specialized skills. Enter Easy Development Studio, a Linux tool designed to make compiling your own ROM easy, or at the very lest manageable, for the layman. Check out the thread on XDA to download the beta.
The app runs a user interface that should be familiar to anyone who’s used a wizard program: select your device, the base ROM (manufacturer stock, open-source Android or a ROM file), select apps to add in or remove, modify APK files to your liking, add a theme and a few settings tweaks, and compile. It’s not exactly c:/DOS/run, but it’s a lot simpler than learning the variety of optimization tools yourself. The developer plans to add plenty of new features in the future, inclooding boot image unpacking, build.prop customizations and custom kernels.
Now for the bad news. As noted above, the tool only works on Linux right now, and only includes ROM files for the HTC EVO 3D (probably the phone the developer owns personally). Eventually versions for Windows and OS X will be produced, and the framework will be expanded to include most popular phones and their various ROMs. So, at the moment the list of potential users, who use both Linux and an EVO 3D, is small. But with time and support, it’s to be hoped that the tool can be made useful for almost everyone. For specific questions or requests, you can reply to the original XDA thread, or contact the developer “wes342” on Twitter. For a similar CyanogenMod-specific tool, see the CM Compiler.
[via Reddit]
