[OnePlus 5 Questions & Answers] guitardedhero:
The vendor firmware landscape has been increasingly adequate for quite some time, providing multiple viable options for a satisfactory mobile experience - buying a device with the intention to separate from its out of the box experience as much as possible no longer makes a compelling case against the unique, and sometimes identity-forming, features provided as stock.

During earlier years, Android, and mobile firmware in general, was controlled by regulations and risks while expanding an entirely new platform. There is no alternative otherwise, and anything less conservative would border reckless abandon.

This paved the way for many enthusiasts under no control to have immersed themselves into the technology like the career engineers and developers were doing, but with the nearly full freedom to test ambitious ideas and solutions unlike their professional peers, who were often limited to free time and with no expectation of something even as simple as maintaining a message board OP exploring those ideas.

This allowed many of those ideas to manifest and be thoroughly tested by many and with an unmatched diversity of real-world usages and trending philosophies. This is when many projects helped form several of the early features unique to the Android platform, absorbing a substantial portion of the risks without fear of retribution, allowing the vendors to devote more time to polish and fine-tuning and less time devoted to brainstorming ideas and risk scenarios.

This afforded the hobbyists a custom platform having quite the head start and that could distance itself from the vendor experience in features, accessibility, and form.

Custom rom's had a different identity then than custom rom's do now, and that is with good reason as well.

Ignoring the few debatable exceptions, custom rom's are currently little more than variations or slight modifications of vendor firmware or AOSP. I exclude CM/LOS simply because CM was among the hobbyists described earlier.

With the feature gap as narrow as it currently is with Mr. Rom Dev and Mr. Lead Software Engineer, the professionals now enjoy an edge with often unlimited resources available providing an experience that is hard to match or exceed with limited time and resources, so users today understandably gravitate towards the familiar vendor experience with a manageable number of features or tweaks.

Of course, even in a market of no stock, consumer demand still determines the custom software landscape.

The benefit today is that ideas and solutions require an extraordinary amount of ingenuity and progressive thinking to stand out and enjoy active development for more than six months. The breakthroughs are far fewer but they are also more impactful in pushing the platform forward.

Having said all that, my purpose for exclusive use of vendor firmware is for hobbyist development reasons. I see no benefit a custom rom would provide for development. I mean, if it works, great. But, if it works only because of the rom, you have essentially prepared something to share among a fraction of one device's users.

If something fails to implement into the vendor firmware, I move on to something else. If it works great for some custom rom's, "Cool, man!", if not, a user has the choice to use the only firmware a developer could logically assume is in use.

So, put gh down for Stock! :good: