[OnePlus 6T  ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other Dev] Terminator.J:
Hey folks,

My name's Jordan, all I wanted was a custom ROM for my wife's Pixel 3a that had unlinked notification & ringtone volume, but it wasn't available at the time, so I tried to see if I could get one to compile, but I couldn't take her phone away, so I had to practice on my OnePlus6, and accidentally practiced a lot and @MaWalla99 wanted to stop maintaining and now I've got USERS. Ugh.

Anyway.

Hi, I'm the new maintainer, and just FYI, if you're sick of how things aren't working on Android 11; I'm still doing builds of crDroid6 as long as the LOS (and then crDroid in turn) devs keep merging monthly security patches.

I know this is the fajita thread, but I got PM'd some questions that might be relevant to everyone's interests, so I figured I'd copy & paste the questions & answers here for the benefit of the entire class:

_____

I don't mind, although I'll copy & paste this info into the crDroid6 threads so everyone can learn the answers and maybe it'll be useful information to help someone else make decisions as well.

Honestly, there are days where I have no idea why I'm bothering with trying to bring up crDroid7 (Android 11) for our devices. It's a collossal pain in the ass. Things that used to work because they were part of the framework (i.e. available due to the actual crDroid ROM devs) had to get removed because it doesn't work correctly in 11 any longer. And the kernel itself doesn't support a lot of the pieces because the official LineageOS maintainer didn't redo years' worth of work to re-do modifications to the LOS kernel when the OxygenOS Q kernel sources dropped -- and I don't blame him! he's busy with four or five newer OnePlus devices to maintain and fix all the crappy stuff in the OnePlus kernel sources for those devices now; that's a boatload of work. At least sm8250 (OP8 series) even HAS Android 11 source available; OP7 wouldn't compile and they pulled the A11 beta program; I don't think we'll be seeing an OOS A11 release for enchilada/fajita for a loooong time yet.

There are no official lineage-18.1 based device trees that actually compile, without going to their gerrit and pulling unmerged bringup hacks that aren't official yet, and a lot of it is just beyond my ability. I don't know much about fixing a broken DT or converting between LineageOS & Omni & AOSP conventions to make things work or changing HALs or so forth.

None of that is to mention the absolute flaming pile of poop that Google itself is responsible for forcing on everyone in Android 11, in forcing Scoped Storage and Storage Access Framework on us. Even on a Pixel with first-party tools, file access is dog slow, and no real security benefits. File managers like Mixplorer and backup/restore solutions like Titanium Backup and SwiftBackup are all boned because even with root, they aren't able to restore files to another app's private /sdcard/Android/data/ dir in a way that's readable by the app you're trying to restore data for.

There are days where I almost talk myself into giving up on working on A11 builds, and just doing small tweaks & merging monthly security updates for crDroid6 (Android 10). I'm not a dev, this is never going to be on the level of PiXeN-OS unless drpradsms decides to take over maintaining for me (fat chance).

So we have fewer working features on crDroid7 than we did on crDroid6 right now, and all the challenges of Android 11 file access shenanigans.

That said, it's still a stable daily driver, battery life is good, and hopefully things will improve slowly but surely.

Alternatively, the crDroid devs are still merging monthly Android Security Bulletins into the crDroid6 trees, and I'm doing blind builds of those (not gonna flash back & forth to test them both, sorry) and releasing them with the device trees just as they were when Max stopped maintaining (so inline twrp, but it's older, but it works).

I honestly don't know how well it works to dirty flash update from crDroid6 to 7. Someone said it worked pretty well for them, but you're likely to want to clean flash at that point anyway just to be on the safe side. I mean, it's a major Android version change. At the minimum you'd want to still do all the work to back up your important data, remove any PIN/pattern/fingerprints (so Device Protection gets disabled), make sure you're on the latest underlying OOS (10.3.9 as of this writing) & TWRP & magisk (so dirty flash latest crDroid6 with all that), before trying to make the jump. And it still might not work well.

crDroid6 isn't being actively SUPPORTED per se, like; I'd be relying on users to make bug reports & test builds, and I have very little free time to work on crDroid7 as it is. But it's also relatively mature, the DTs work there, and I'll keep building it as long as they keep merging monthly security updates. You might even get a couple surprise new features ROM-side as the devs work on things.

It's pretty solid either way, and one of the only ROMs for enchilada/fajita that actively supports microG usage (yes to package signature spoofing, no to built-in GApps) with halfway-decent customization & functionality. If it helps with your decision-making, I should be releasing an April update within a week that, I'm hoping, will bring back the DeviceSettings functionality ("OnePlus Settings") we've been missing for months & months now in crDroid7.

Cheers,

Jordan ("Terminator J on the wheels of steel!")