6 CyanogenMod Alternatives For Your Android Device

Do you want to switch from CyanogenMod? This article will help you choose the best alternative for CyanogenMod – an alternate custom firmware that you will love to flash on your phone.

CyanogenMod, unquestionably, is one of the best innovations that ever happened in the Android world. However, it is also true that CyanogenMod, like any other firmware, comes with (some) flaws and has room for further improvements. That is the reason people go for other, open and superior firmware.

Here we list the top 6 alternatives of CyanogenMod to help you make your decision and choose the best firmware for your device. Let’s learn what makes them unique and what they have to offer.

Carbon Rom

Carbon Rom is simply beautiful – it is an elegant Android firmware, which encourages a clean and simple visual interface. It gives you the power to better customize your device and underneath the Android, as per your needs, thus making the device your very own – something that reflects you and your style.

Carbon Rom is brilliantly designed, and comes with intuitive and useful features. It does not provide unnecessary features and delivers a fast and responsive user experience. Additionally, it offers performance options that can be used to further improve the speed and performance of your device.

Carbon Rom packs all the features under one title – ‘Carbon Fibres‘. It organizes all the ROM’s features with Scrollable tabs under their respective categories. It integrates the new CM 11’s Theme engine and many other special features like HALO, PIE, active display, lock screen options, navigation bar, quick settings, dark mode, etc.

Slim ROMs

Slim ROMs are a major player in the market of custom firmware. Slim ROMs are slim in size but no less in features. Its releases are named after that particular Android version, for example, Slim ROM for KitKat is known as SlimKat. The Slim Team always comes up with something new that Android has not yet seen, and that feature are adopted by other custom firmware later on.

One of the Slim ROMs’ USPs is that its team tries to support most of the popular devices. This enables people having legacy or low-range Android devices to get stable, superb custom firmware for their devices. For example, they provided a stable build for Moto G before CyanogenMod’s team came up with a stable release for Motorola’s most successful Android phone.

Slim ROMs comes with unique and innovative features. Its team does things differently, and they always experiment with the features and apps of AOSP and other custom ROMs, and guess what? They mostly end up creating something better. Some of the features are Slim Recents, Custom Quick Settings Tiles, SlimPIE, Notification Reminder, and Slim Dialer.

AOSB

AOSB or so-called “Android Open Source Bam project” is a project dedicated to giving your phone something special. It is a fast Android operating system – custom firmware that claims to boot up in just 2 seconds and shut down or reboot in only 1 second.

AOSB is a marvelous, feature-packed ROM – it packs many unique as well as borrowed features from various custom firmware. One of the best features is the OTA support – which lets you update your firmware on the air without the need of flashing the ROM files again. Other features include animation controls, a custom progress bar, etc.

AOSB has the features of much popular firmware. Gesture Anywhere from Chameleon OS can be used to create custom gestures to launch applications and shortcuts. OmniSwitch from OmniROM is an app switcher that enhances your multi-tasking capabilities. Moreover, it also comes with HALO, Slim ROMs’ Dark UI, advanced battery bar, built-in Xposed framework, etc.

*Note: Anything, here, refers to custom firmware only.

MIUI

MIUI is a stock and aftermarket Android firmware developed by Xiaomi Tech, the company behind the popular Mi 3 smartphone. MIUI looks very different from the AOSP for a good reason – it provides a faster, unique and heavily customized user interface, which attempts to provide a simple and refined phone experience.

MIUI is packed with lots of security and privacy features. MiCloud Messaging offers private messaging and a secure pin feature to protect your personal messages. The Anti-Spam feature protects you from unwanted calls and messages whilst the Permission Manager shows the permission details for each application on your phone. Additional features include anti-virus, backup, device finder, etc.

MIUI takes customization to another level by providing thousands of personalized themes, numerous lock screens, and various MiSpaces. MiSpace is the modern replacement for the traditional home screen, which brings a new way to interact with your phone. Other impressive features include toggle drop-down bar, an always-on alarm clock, re-designed app switcher, among others.

Paranoid Android

Paranoid Android offers you a mobile experience full of customizations – from user interface modes to app colors and themes. It provides many unique and original features to completely modify the mobile’s interface according to your requirements and make your device truly yours.

Paranoid Android is power charged with multi-tasking features. PIE mode provides more room for the content by hiding navigation and status bars on a quick button press, and a simple swiping gesture from the bottom of the screen brings back the navigation. Floating mode allows you to open a smaller version of applications from Recent Apps without leaving/closing apps that are running.

Paranoid Android comes with a mix of UI layouts –phone, phablet and tablet layouts are available. Hybrid mode lets you set individual apps to have the tablet layout on your phone. Other features include app privacy, HALO, themes, etc.

OmniROM

OmniROM is all about flexibility, innovation, new features, and freedom. It is a project from some well-recognized folks of the XDA community, which started its development as a reaction to the commercialization of the popular CyanogenMod ROM.

OmniROM is a relatively new custom firmware in the market. Though it is a work-in-progress, it offers state-of-the-art features. OmniSwitch is a better app switcher with support for application control and favorites. It provides action buttons for application control such as “kill all” and “switch to the last app“. OpenDelta updates are incremental updates, which minimize the download size and provide an easy and quick method to update frequently.

OmniROM may include a new feature in its future release, which is known as Custom Hotword. It is a way for the user to create custom hotwords, which can be used to set up a phrase to startup Chrome, dial your family or launch the camera. It is similar to the “Ok Google” feature that opens Google Now, but this is different as you can create your very own hotwords.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you find the best custom firmware for your device – a ROM that is better than CyanogenMod and provides you with a pure, personalized Android experience. Flash a custom ROM from the above-listed firmware as per your requirements of features, and enjoy the new experience!

Which is your favorite CyanogenMod alternative? Let us know through the comments section below.