[Nexus 5 Android Development] atl4ntis:
On Cataclysm development and genesis

Hello everyone,

this is a development thread after all so i like to update you over what's going on and about my development.

If you're interested in how Cataclysm is developed, why it's different from other firmwares, why gapps are included have this read, hopefully it won't annoy you so much.

Keep also in mind that i'm not bashing full AOSP firmwares, it's just how Cataclysm was born.

I'm also aware of the possible legal infringments in including gapps without certification.

Writing this due to the gapps complaining.

AOSP is different from Stock firmwares, mainly due to the closed sources nature of apps, blobs, etc that comes with a stock image.

What comes out of AOSP is pretty much useless to end users.

Even when new sources are published you will still need the factory image cause some files are missing from AOSP.

You can of course build new sources but they will have always something missing or different.

People claiming it differently are either ignorant or are trying to fool their users.

Just flashing Gapps over simple AOSP firmwares is not enough if you don't change on AOSP lot of subtle settings which are always hard to track at first.

I remember location issues, sprint issues, sync issues, dialer issues on fresh AOSP builds right after new android releases.

Also some existing Gapps package are poorly made, had my confirmation when i saw odexed gapps floating around when Kitkat was released, cause they were "needed to be odexed" for ART.

That's why i strongly suggest you to NOT install third party Gapps, even to update them. Just update them from Play store.

I've always felt stock roms to be more stable then simply aosp roms.

With all above considerations then my thought was: don't fix what ain't broken.

I started "modding" my stock rom, by decompiling it and adding some features in smali doing a diff with fresh compiled AOSP files.

I've also noticed all the features i needed were pretty much inside always the same files.

Then i worked on a way where i could just pickup whole freshly compiled files from AOSP and copy over stock with no issues, without the needs of manually editing them.

This pretty much allowed me to create Cataclysm.

Cataclysm is basically only NINE files different from STOCK ROM.

Those nine files are modified before adding features to be also 100% like the ones in stock image.

Hell, having more Google experience devices, more time and a smarter installer as i need to "prepare" the stock rom for "accepting" the aosp files, i could've released not

Cataclysm ROM, but a CataclysmMOd of around 25 MB which would install on any stock rom / device converting it like Cataclysm is for you now.

Something like stock + exposed + gravity box = stock + cataclysm mod.

This approach has basically made easier to me to have a pretty much bufree firmware for more then two years.

Also this makes any bug you can encounter, related only to the features i add and only to them, No gps issues, sync or stock features missing.

There are lot of other things i could say, like why the name Cataclysm or the differencies developing this alone instead of being a team, but maybe on another episode :p.

Hope you had a good read.