Most of the devices are tested with LineageOS (official and some unofficial releases) as well as LineageOS for MicroG or PixelExperience when available. But you can use the OpenAndroidInstaller to install all kinds of custom Android ROMs.
If your device is currently not supported, you have basically two options.
If you have some experience with flashing Android ROMs, you can find more details on how to contribute here: How to contribute?
You can also open a github issue and ask for support for your device. There might be reasons, that your device is not supported and likely will not get support.
Addons are optional, additional apps and services that are useful to have. Most notable Google Apps and Services as well as MicroG to replace them or the F-Droid FOSS App-Store.
There are different packages of *Google Apps* available.
You can find out more about MicroG here: MicroG. The recommended way to install MicroG is to use the zip file provided here: FriendlyNeighborhoodShane/MinMicroG_releases. The best way to get an installable zip for F-Droid can be found here: F-Droid App-Store.
While we don't like google apps, some people feel that they need them to leverage the full experience of their Android devices. We believe people should be free to do what they want with their devices. So installing them is supported as well.
It is still recommended to use ROMs with built-in Google Apps like PixelExperience.
Sometimes things will hang with showing "waiting-for-device" in the "Advanced output" view or fail to send the recovery or image to the device correctly.
What you can do in this case:
Sometimes the selected ROM image will not boot properly. Usually, in this case, the image is not suited for the specific device or is broken.
What you can do in this case:
Of course, there are other things that can go wrong. If non of the above helps, write an email or raise an issue on GitHub.
First of all, this tool will not help you bypass any vender locked bootloaders in non-official ways.
Devices by Samsung, Google and Fairphone make it fairly easy to unlock the bootloader and receive good support in the installer.
Some devices with require manual steps to unlock the bootloader. In general you will need to create an account at a vendor website and receive some code from there. OpenAndroidInstaller will try to guide you as far as possible. These vendors include Sony, Motorola, Xiaomi and OnePlus among others.
Other phone vendors stops allowing to unlock the bootloader all together. There is nothing to be done if you didn't unlock your device in time. These vendors include Huawei and LG among others. Support for these vendors will always be very limited.
In some virus scanners the OpenAndroidInstaller shows up as a virus or trojan. This is a false positive. We explain the issue here. The code and build process of the distributed files is completely open source and can be found on github. So people can verify that it's not malicious software.
The Installer is bundled and compiled python code made into an executable file. This is done with pyinstaller. As it turns out, false positive issues are known and people encounter them regularly.
As far as we know, there is no real solution to this issue.
It seems like sometimes fastboot (the tool used for flashing the recovery) doesn't work properly. A possible solution weirdly can be to try a different USB-cable and/or different USB-Ports.
For the flatpak, the logs are located in ~/.var/app/org.openandroidinstaller.OpenAndroidInstaller/data/openandroidinstaller.log.
If you are running the executable directly, the logs are located in the same directory as the executable.