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The long wait is finally over. We’re proud to present the official builds of CR-9.0, based on Android 11.
We know it’s been a while, but after we were already late to the game this cycle, we decided to take the extra time in order to start off with something we believe to be the best iteration of CarbonROM yet.
The first and most apparent change is dropping the previously known codenames. In the past, we’ve discovered that users had issues understanding the Android version behind each Carbon iteration, caused by the different revision numbers and codenames. Also, it’s pretty damn hard to find a codename starting with Q ;). Therefore we decided that, from now on, CR-9.0 will simply be known as “R”.
Furthermore, we have adopted the device support requirement charter known from other projects, to have a public facing list of device requirements for a device to go official that previously only existed internally.
The first 16 devices passing these requirements are as following:
More devices are due to go official at a later date, some of which may follow as soon as the next release.
Which leads to the next topic: Release schedules.
Due to how advanced the development of CR-9.0 is already, we believe that weekly releases are both a waste of time and power. Therefore, we decided that, despite being labeled “WEEKLY”, CR-9.0 releases will be released on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. That gives us the time to integrate security patches at an early date, while still leaving room for followup bugfixes/new features near the end of the month.
Now, what can be expected from CR-9.0:
Currently, R contains all features you know from CR-8.0, with a few improvements to usability as well as a few new addition and improvements, like Powershare and proximity checks for doubletap to wake on supported devices.
As expected, it also includes our Font engine, so nobody will prevent you from using your own Comic Sans font package.
Additionally, there have been changes and server sided improvements to the way CarbonDelta works in order to improve delta handling, resulting in less data usage overall. An ASB update for the OnePlus 9 Pro could be as low as 50MB to download!
Lastly, we hope that you enjoy R as much as we do and enjoy CarbonROM!
As always, let us know about improvements you’d like to see and any potential bugs you encounter so we can take care of them.
Greetings everyone
First of all, we’d like to start off by wishing you a happy new year from everyone at the CarbonROM Team.
Now onto the news we go:
As you probably noticed, we moved PAX to a Monthly cycle now. The reason behind this is that we want to fully focus on Q (which has yet to receive a full codename). We therefore set PAX on Feature Freeze and it will only receive bugfixes and security patches from now on. The only user-facing changes to that are less frequent updates and the change from Weekly to Release. You can upgrade to a Release coming from a Weekly without problems.
As for Q: We are still very busy with the bringup and progress wise are still a little behind of what we had planned, mostly because we decided to rework a few things and that is taking longer than we anticipated.
Either way, we are confident that it will be worth it in the future and we are looking forward to deliver you the typical Carbon experience soon(ish).
Now that Android 11 is released and you slowly but steadily realise that it will take at least a few months until Android 11 custom ROMs are coming to your device we are here to cheer you up with news. Big ones this time, if we may say so.
First of, the good news. We added new devices and other devices have been upgrade to CR-8.0 coming from CR-7.0.
New in CR-8.0:
Upgraded from CR-7.0:
Sadly, due to absolutely unaccepable behaviour by a former team member we also had to disable two devices due to a now lack of maintainer.
For now the devices have been disabled and will stay disabled until a maintainer steps up. There’s already some devs showing interest in following up but that will probably take a while to settle in.
Disabled devices:
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 (lavender)
- Xiaomi Redmi 7 (onclite)
We’re sorry for the inconvenince but the behaviour and views of said maintainer were inacceptable and hurt other members of the community which is inacceptable to us.
Thats not it just yet though. We’ve been working hard in the past week and introduced a bunch of heavy improvements to the ROM itself. Usually this kind of post would begin by explaining how we merged the Android Security Patches for September. Unfortunately, these have not been released yet, but rest assured they will be merged once released though. That also means that the currently merged Android Security Patch on both CR-7.0 and CR-8.0 is August.
In addition to that, we have merged various improvements. Better organisation inside CarbonFibers and Settings, fixed a few Search related issues and introduced design improvements to the lockscreen clocks to unify them in look and behaviour. In earlier builds we also introduced the long requested VoLTE and VoWiFi icons that can be enabled inside CarbonFibers.
The most noticible improvement however should be changes to the font engine. We reworked the way fonts get applied to make it work with USAP Pooling. USAP Pooling is a process to improve app startup times enabled on some devices (e.G. The OnePlus 7 family). However, during the rework we also improved font applying for devices without USAP pooling which, during our tests, resulted in improved app launch times of up to 25%. With the usage of USAP Pools that went as high as 35% compared to the old font implementation without the usage of USAP pools.
TL;DR: It’s fast now. Very fast.
There’s still a few things planned for CR-8.0 and we’re far away from dropping support on it anytime soon. However, as always with a new Android release available, things might be a little slower now that the team is working on Android 11 bringup. Stay tuned!
As always, we’d like to end with a warm welcome to new users and devices and happy flashing to all of you!
As many noticed already, this weekly had been delayed by a day.
This was caused by the rebase on top of the latest Android 10 Release 37 (QQ3A.200605.001) branches and the required testing that followed.
We tried to test everything as good as we can but, as always, with new changes there can be issues, so make sure to let us know if you find something we missed.
These weeklies are building right now and should be online soon.
Speaking of issues: There’s been reports on the past of very occasional freezes when trying to open apps which seem to fix themself after a few seconds.
We gathered a few logs but unfortunately the issue is very hard to reproduce and the logs are not fully conclusive.
If you encounter the issue, please try to grab a log and send it to us on the usual support platforms.
As for Noct: We had to take the hard decision to stop supporting Noct. We just lack the time to continue putting effort into it.
That means the May release of Noct builds will be the last official builds. We continue working on bringing newer revisions of Carbon to the devices that are now no longer officially supported but, as usual, there won’t be any ETA or list of which devices will be added to newer versions.
It is currently planned that Opal will continue to get security patches until, at least, our official Android R release.
With that said,
Happy updating and please continue sending us logs so that we can fix remaining issues!
Today, we’re here to announce the latest and greatest revision of CarbonROM.
CR-8.0 will be codenamed PAX, after the latin word for peace and Pax, the roman godess for peace.
PAX is based on Android 10 with the April Security patches and is coming to a total of 18 devices.
These are:
Starting with the builds on the 9th of September, the following device will join the official list:
There are many more devices scheduled to release soon after a proper recovery solution has been sorted out for them.
We are proud to say, that PAX is by far the most complete and unique release of CarbonROM we ever had. New features have been introduced and existing features have been polished to match our standards. That means, for example, that custom battery styles have been rewritten in Kotlin to fit the Android 10 codestyle while keeping and extending their features from Android 9.
We also brought back custom fonts as you know them from previous revisions of CarbonROM. The included fonts as well as font packages created on fonts.carbonrom.org can be applied systemwide, including on userapps. That means browsing reddit with Comic Sans MS is no longer a problem ;)
There’s also been many quality of life improvements all over the place, and your now greeted by a new Setup Wizzard walking you through setting up Carbon.
All that happened while keeping our main focus on delivering a smooth and bugfree ROM in mind, and we’re confident you will agree with us that this succeeded.
All of this would not have been possible without the contributions of all our team members. Which brings us to the next topic:
Carbon is growing!
Starting with Android 10, the CarbonROM Team will be joined by the former team of AquariOS. We’ve been working together in the past already, and with them joining the team we look forward to making CarbonROM even greater! We’d also like to welcome our new maintainers and me2151, who claims to do nothing but is a great addition to the core team!
As always, make sure to reach out to us on Discord, Telegram or via email if you need any support, encounter bugs or just want to chat with us.
Happy flashing!
P.S: Like Opal, followup updates will arrive Weekly on Wednesdays.
P.P.S: As we’ve been asked a lot, you can now find a few screenshots of what to expect here.
Most of you already got the update and some already discovered the new changes. For those that didn’t yet, here is what to look out for.
The latest weeklies feature the August Security Patches based on android-9.0.0_r46 and we’ve added lockscreen weather! You can enable it in CarbonFibers.
Also, thanks to newly joined team members we were able to extend our list of supported devices.
We’re happy to welcome back the Samsung Galaxy S2 (yes, that thing that released with Gingerbread back in 2011) and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5.
Lastly, an announcement for all OnePlus 3/3T users: Starting with the latest weekly you will need to use the latest Pie firmware from OnePlus.
Hey everyone,
It’s that time again. We finally wrote a new blogpost.
This time, we’re going to tell you that we merged the June Patches in both, Oreo and Pie. The respectives branches are android-8.1.0_r65 and android-9.0.0_r40.
Next up, the CarbonROM Font Generator. Have you ever missed those Microsoft Paint days where you’d create the sickest graphics with Comic Sans MS? Were you sad that we can’t include that because of Licensing on Redistribution? Well worry no longer! You can now use any TTF or OTF file of your desire and generate an resource APK out of it to use on most ROMs that feature the DU Font Engine. There are no limits. Just remember how to get back to the font chooser in case you decide to give Webdings a try ;)
Last but not least, an important announcement for all OnePlus 6 and 6T users. Tomorrow’s builds include some changes to the way NFC works in order to fix some issues with e.g. Google Pay. However, this is not compatible with the previous implementation, which means that you need to manually wipe the NFC data. You can do so by going to TWRP and deleting /data/nfc. Don’t worry, if you only delete that folder none of your data will be lost and NFC will work flawlessly after a reboot. Until you do that however, NFC will not work, so make sure to do that.
We’re currently all working hard on new features and are still finishing up some new devices that are due to join soon.
Let us know what you think about the Font Generator!
Happy Flashing/Fonting :P
I know, my headlines can be very confusing at times. However I promise it makes sense this time.
Today is the day that Joe and Kennedy were looking forward to since Christmas of 2017.
It’s their wedding day.
From everyone in the team we wish them lots of love and happiness!
Some of you might wonder why we brought that up. The reason is that the CarbonROM team had a crucial role in their engagement. You can read the full story on Android Central.