CustomDroid

Best phones to buy for a custom ROM

If you're buying a phone specifically to run a custom ROM, these are the ones worth looking at: the newest hardware that still has an actively maintained ROM. Newer phones come first on purpose — a fresh phone's hardware, its battery most of all, simply lasts longer, so a 2026 phone with one live ROM beats a 2020 phone with a dozen.

How this list is ranked

Sorted by release date, newest first, then filtered to phones with at least one non-discontinued ROM updated in the last six months — so every phone here is both recent and still supported today. ROM count is shown as a confidence signal, not a ranking factor.

Want the full picture? Browse every newest phone (including ones with quieter ROMs), or check the latest builds.

CustomDroid indexes ROM builds, it doesn't host them, and this isn't a paid placement — the order is generated from release dates and each project's own build feed. Always download from the official project.