What times those when installing a ROM was vital in order to have a stable phone and without serious problems in the experience of daily use. And if we went through installing a zip file on the microSD drive, in the near future the fact of "flashing" or installing a ROM will be through a web browser.
So everything will be online and we will not need anything more than a compatible browser to be able to install an update or install a firmware that leaves it as ex-factory. Apart from the fact that many are still attracted by the need or simply the pleasure of trying other things when that time in which we do not touch anything has passed.
Installing a new ROM
For those of us who have been used to installing firmware or custom ROMs facing another is almost something routine in which we see no danger, but it is true that for the new user who does it for the first time, the time that can be consumed in doing it can be more than a serious problem.
And it is that even for advanced users even simple actions such as the PC recognizing the device it can become quite a challenge, and that becomes between a man-machine fight to see who can do more.
In other words, in order to avoid all these hassles, it seems that we will have in our hand the possibility of installing a ROM from the web. And is that Everything started to change when Google published its Android Flash Tool as an attempt to make the job of installing a ROM easier and everyone would use the same tool.
The curious thing about those years is that it has already begun to drop that doing it through the web would be the simplest process and productive of all that could be done. And it is that the method itself consists of downloading the image to load from the ROM and using the commands that from the PC allow us to carry out that action. From the web everything would be optimized to make it much easier.
Flashing a ROM from the web
The Google tool does offer compatibility to the installation of a ROM from the web, but it is quite restrictive and only works on some devices, and only AOSP images and official firmware packages can be installed.
Here comes into the picture Danny Lin, a developer at xda developers, who developed fastboot.js, a JavaScript implementation of the fastboot protocol that uses the WebUSB API, and that is focused on giving operability to users who install custom ROMs.
This Javascript tool essentially allows you to install a custom ROM from the web browser. In fact, Lin has already created an Android web installer that works entirely from the web. In fact if you have a device that is supported or is compatible with the ProtonAOSP project, you can install a ROM using a fork of this installer.
Using Chromium-based browsers
An experimental version of our web-based installer for GrapheneOS is now available:https://t.co/29OBsANCta
This can be used from browsers with WebUSB support. Most Chromium-based browsers are supported including Chrome, Edge and Brave. You don't need to run any additional software.
- GrapheneOS (@GrapheneOS) January 24, 2021
Lin too programmed the web installer for a new privacy-focused project known as GrapheneOS. If we know that Chromium offers WebUSB support since version 61, any browser based on Chromium, such as Chrome or Microsoft Edge, and installed on a PC, can use the flashing tool.
In Windows you need a special driver that will be downloaded immediately by Windows Update, so we will not have any problem when it comes to handling this online tool to install custom ROMs.
This is the link to fastboot.js repository, with which with what was said and those browsers can flash ROMs from the comfort of the web without having to download anything.
