Vsenn – Project Ara's competitor – to allow custom ROMs without voiding your warranty

A few days ago, we heard about Vsenn – a new startup project, aiming to create a modular smartphone – much like Project Ara, though, simpler – with only 3 modules to swap and customize – those being RAM / CPU combo, battery, and camera. The phone is promised to come with vanilla Android, which will receive updates for 4 years post-release.

It seems that Vsenn will be allowing a bit more customization on the OS part, too, as the company took to Twitter yesterday to announce a partnership with AOSPA a.k.a. Paranoid Android – one of the most popular custom ROMs out there. What this partnership should mean to the end consumer is that flashing Paranoid Android on a Vsenn handset will NOT void one's warranty. It is probably safe to assume that AOSPA will come up with a dedicated installer for Vsenn to make flashing its custom ROM onto the modular handset even easier, or at least add some unique features for the phone, as compared to others.

Paranoid Android is famous for bringing some clever options to Android handsets, such as hovering notifications (well before Lollipop came around); Pie Controls, which hides the phone's bottom row of controls, but pops it up in a pie shape, when the user drags a finger from the bottom of the screen; Peek – a notifications preview on the lockscreen, but only if one pulls out the phone out of their pocket right after it rings / vibrates; and others.

We still have no information on when Vsenn will bring about its first product, though, we'd wager it will be well into next year, at least.