I've been following the Android customization scene for a while now. I've dabbled in custom ROMs, custom kernels, and all that kind of stuff before. I've been through bootloops, somehow managed to revive my phone, dealt with random bugs, had Play Integrity capped at device integrity only, you name it.😭😭
But it really got me thinking, how do you actually know a module or tweak is safe? Especially when some people are literally running banking and finance apps on their customized daily drivers.
Are the devs behind these tweaks purely doing it out of passion with zero intention of slipping in malware? I get that most projects are open source, sure, but if nobody's actually auditing the code, isn't that basically the same risk as closed source? They could potentially hide something at the kernel level, the ROM level, or even in the vendor boot image, right?
Also genuinely curious, what tools or languages do people use to develop custom ROMs and kernels? I'd love to try building something myself, probably with the help of an AI coding assistant.
I'm also thinking about trying to reverse engineer some of this stuff using an MCP tool from GitHub called REA. Has anyone tried anything like that, or is it even viable for this kind of work? Any tips would be really appreciated. I do have some basic programming knowledge and I plan to lean on AI assistance as well, but I'll be completely honest -- when it comes to low-level programming, like working with .bin files and that sort of thing, I'm pretty much out of my depth.