MoDaCo.Switch beta for HTC One out now; Galaxy S4 version being crowdfunded

If you own an HTC One, you might have considered flashing the Google Edition ROM with the stock Android user interface. However, Sense UI has some great

Ramkumar Iyer|Jul 29, 2013, 17:17:31 IST

If you own an HTC One, you might have considered flashing the Google Edition ROM with the stock Android user interface. However, Sense UI has some great features that might be hard to let go of. Well, you can now have the best of both worlds thanks to MoDaCo.Switch, which was recently made available as public beta. You can download the ROM here.

However, the good news doesn’t end here. MoDaCo has also started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to bring MoDaCo.Switch for the Samsung Galaxy S4 i9505. The campaign has 19 days left and has already earned 819 pounds of its 1,000 pound goal. caption

Superman, Batman, Spider Man etc. would be impressed.

MoDaCo.Switch is a new ROM concept that switches between two ROMs (Sense UI and Google Edition in this case) on the fly. It even lets you access all the data—including all the applications you’ve installed and other data—on your phone from either ROM, as all the data is shared.

There’s no need to back-up all your apps, wipe data, flash a kernel, boot into the recovery, flash the new ROM and hope it doesn’t turn your phone into an expensive paperweight. Instead, you get an app called Switch that lets you switch from one ROM to another. Once you choose the UI you want to switch to, your phone will reboot into the UI in a process that takes a little longer than a normal boot.

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Obviously, you will have to root and unlock your HTC One’s bootloader to flash MoDaCo.Switch. The ROM can be installed in the usual way via Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP) or ClockworkMod Recovery (CWM), two of the most popular recoveries. Sense is based on the 2.24 European HTC One ROM (which is also Android 4.2.2), while stock Android is obviously the Google Play edition ROM.

However, as the ROM is still in beta, your call logs and MMS data can’t yet be shared between the two UIs. Also, you shouldn’t expect the ROM to work perfectly on your HTC One either. MoDaCo.Switch comes unrooted out of the box, but you can download an optional package that’ll root the ROM for you.

By Ramkumar Iyer

Behind his cold and drowsy exterior is the still cold but slightly less sleepy Ram. He's essentially paid to be our own personal grammar nazi. He tends to take his job a little too seriously, so you may sometimes see him running around punching his colleagues in the arm for typos and grammar mistakes. Some of his favorite topics to find mistakes in are games and open source stuff like Linux, but he also maintains a fleeting interest in smartphones. He also loves Michael Jackson's Heal the World the same way a little girl loves cockroaches.