Are custom roms safe- do you use your email, buy things on it?

[sergey]

So for those people out there who are running custom roms, do you use your primary gmail account and do all the things you normally would? Like check your bank account, pay off bills, buy things online, etc? I wonder how safe the "brand-name" custom roms are for this (like a cyanogenmod ROM) Does anybody here take precautions over stock?

 

[NGD1]

custom roms are generally safe, if one is bad usually user ratings will deter other users from installing it,
in Cyanogenmods case they are an extremely well built amazing community of users and rom developers so there really never is any complaint like that, i ran a custom rom for my phone and talk to its developer constantly and i love it.

 

[nickdalzell]

custom ROMs are fine. i just be careful--if they unlock every menu in the phone and allow the user to change security-sensitive stuff like disabling the lock screen (bad for prying eyes) or save local copies of bank account info, i would be very careful how much i play around in them. usually disabling things like unknown install (locks the phone into the market, which is safer, while turning it on allows side-loading where spyware is a possibility) and USB Debugging are good ideas when not using any of the features. overall a custom ROM could just be a rooted newer copy of Android for a phone/tablet not supporting it OTA.

 

[chanchan05]

If you are skeptical, go for CyanogenMod. At least those are legit, I mean the head of CyanogenMod is a Samsung employee.

 

[nickdalzell]

i would, save the problem of some phones not being compatible with CM yet. which is still an issue in my case. so far the only custom ROMs are slightly modified stock ROMs, with new kernels for overclocking.

CyanogenMod ROMs are one of my favorites--i try to only keep devices capable of running it.

 

[sergey]

Thanks for the replies... actually I rooted and installed CM10 Android 4.1.2 by pershoot from the xda forums. I got everything off of galaxytabhacks.com. But I'm using a dummy account for now.

 

[Rxpert83]

Custom Roms are safe. Everything is open source, so if they added something fishy other devs would know very quickly.

 

[nickdalzell]

congrats on CyanogenMod 10. you should enjoy it for me, my phone is a ZTE Merit, which shows no signs or hope of getting CM 7 yet (7 runs in my favorite version--2.3 Gingerbread) but i'm giving it a few months.

 

[sergey]

So far so good on the CM10.
It's only been a day, but overall it is very good.
It runs much smoother and google now is pretty cool
The navigation seems to be busted- I can't get a gps signal. But no big deal since this strictly used in the home only.

 

[NightHawk877]

I'm using a Samsung galaxy S 3 with Paranoid Kangdroid on it. Best ROM I have ever used because it can be customized out the wazoo.