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Samsung Galaxy S III
Why CyanogenMod?

Jim Carter, 2012-10-23

I was asked, why did you put a beta version of CyanogenMod on your pocket computer, with bugs, rather than sticking with the carrier's image, where everything works (sic) and which is optimized (sic) for their network?

What's Wrong with the Carrier's Android Version

My carrier is Verizon, but these complaints are made, with varying details, by forum posters about every carrier's version of Android. A common theme is, I want to do things with my pocket computer way beyond the cellphone role, and the carrier does not intend to support such usage.

What About Rooting the Stock OS?

Some of my issues could be solved if I would jailbreak the carrier's OS by installing the su (superuser) application. But Verizon has a locked bootloader, which must be broken before a user can take control of his pocket computer. Then I would need to undo a lot of the modifications that Verizon made to Android. It seems more prudent and more economical to put on the machine an up-to-date OS image intended for developers and root users, rather than trying to straighten out Verizon's back-version OS.

What's Good About CyanogenMod?

Conclusion

The carrier's version of Android prevents me from doing important activities on my pocket computer; CyanogenMod enables those activities. Therefore I have broken the locked bootloader and have installed CyanogenMod on my device.

Appendix: Extant Bugs in CyanogenMod-10

These bugs are currently making trouble for me. This is in cm-10.0.0-d2vzw.zip, the stable version dated 2012-11-13. See the bug reports page for other bugs that have been fixed.

Appendix: History of Android and AOSP

Here is a summary of the history and provenance of Android, extracted from this Wikipedia article about AOSP.