Rooted Phones: Stock vs Custom ROMs

[Cs342]

Hi guys, I just want to get your opinions on stock ROMs and custom ROMs. I know that most people will root their Android phones, but not many people will install custom ROMs. i recently gave in to the temptation and installed Cyanogenmod 10.1 on my LG Optimus 4X HD because it apparently brings better performance and more customization options. However, from the moment I installed it my phone felt very laggy and sluggish. The launcher that came with CM 10.1 was incredibly slow and was definitely running under 30FPS. The pull-down notification bar was very choppy and not buttery smooth like it was on the stock ROM. My phone has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor so I don't think it is a hardware issue.

 

Also, I don't see what customization options a custom ROM has given me. I can't even move photos from one album to another on the gallery app that comes with Cyanogenmod, whereas I could easily do it with a few taps on the stock LG ROM. Aside from that, when I take photos with the front facing camera they are saved flipped instead of the way I took them, so I end up sending people mirror images on Whatsapp. This has never happened on the stock ROM and so far I cannot find a way to fix it.

 

With all these weird bugs and lack of noticeable performance enhancements (quite the opposite, in fact), I have decided to go back to the stock ROM which worked flawlessly for me in the past. Just wanted to share my experience with you guys. Please let me know your thoughts and opinions

[Cacao]

CM is made to give you an experience as close to stock android as possible, if you like many of the features that LG adds to android then it's probably not for you. If you just want to customize then a simple root is enough, you can simply change individual things to your liking. You should only use a ROM if you want to overhaul you whole phone.

 

As for CM running slow, that's very strange. In my experience (with Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note II) it made my phone much snappier, close to doubled my battery life and got rid of many of the bloatware that Samsung put on it. The down side for me was that it removed pretty much all S pen functionality. 

[Scia]

I usually root the phone a few weeks after I got a new one, and then immediately custom ROM it. I really like the functionality of custom roms.

Got my SGS4 yesterday, but it's still Vanilla. Checking through my ROMs of trust [indie / Omega and Bajee / RootBox] ^^

[Cs342]

I'm new to the whole android scene too, I just got a Nexus 4, will battery life be altered by with a custom rom compared to completely stock android like on the Nexus?

Installing a custom ROM halved my battery life for some reason

[Darell3]

For me switching from stock ICS 4.0.4 to JB 4.2.2 and soon to be 4.3 my battery life doubled, much more ram free and also a huge performance increase. Im capable to OC my phone to 1.5ghz stable on dual core.

[Corsus]

I run AOSPA on my Note (GT-N7000). My recommended flavor of Android would be AOSPA; it gives close to AOSP experience but with a lot more tweaks and perks. Most of the problems I've had is usually kernel related. One thing I didn't know initially was that when you flash a rom, it also flashes a included kernel. If you flash some other uber-ed up kernel after you flash the flavor of rom you like, you will most likely get a much better experience. It is also worthy to mention, that there are a lot of different flavors of roms on xda, read the comments. But as with anything of the modding nature, a LOT of reading is needed to get satisfactory results.