OmniROM: solid Android rom, nice place for newcomers

When my last phone died in December, I decided to steer clear of contracts (so that my family could maybe get off of AT&T once all the contracts on the plan expire) and get a Nexus 5. I’ve usually used Cyanogenmod in the past, but I decided to try out the newer OmniROM this time. The Omni project started last year as a response to Cyanogenmod shifting from a completely volunteer project to a for-profit company — sort of the Canonical of the Android ecosystem. I like that the philosophy of Omni is about respecting users and adding value to the open source Android ecosystem.

One concrete difference from Cyanogenmod is that Omni encourages bug reports for from avid users. (Cyanogenmod does not take bug reports for nightly builds, even though that’s what the users who care most about new features and recent changes tend to use.) When I started using Omni, I noticed a few little things that annoyed me: inconsistent icons, and non-standard capitalization in the menu. So I filed some bugs in their bug tracker. These were minor issues, but the developers were quite responsive. The icons I complained about got fixed after a few days. So I decided to try to scratch my own itch for another bug. I followed their guide for getting set up as a developer, and then I submitted patches to fix the capitalization problems I had noticed. (All I did was change a few strings.) All my patches got merged within a few days of submission. 🙂

OmniROM is still a small project, but so far I think it’s a great place for newcomers who want to try out open source Android development.