See, I am a tinkerer by nature. I get bored when things work well and so I often go out of my way to create problems and spend days trying to fix it. Terrible habits, I know.
I love Android. I have been an Android user for the better part of my adult life, ever since I got my very own Huawei Ideos back in 2011. Shitty phone, revolutionary concept and yes, I flashed way too many custom ROMs on that thing.
My obsession for flashing various ROMs further thrived when I got me a refurbished HTC One X sometime in 2014. Resurrection Remix, CyanogenMod, these became my life for a period. But then they got boring.
I now use a Pocophone F1, arguably one of the most developer friendly devices of the past few years. With that, I was reintroduced to the world of custom ROMs after a long period of using Mediatek devices from Tecno and Infinix.
Today, custom ROMs are honestly, boring. They all try to mimic stock Android and Pixel devices, maybe to a fault. Yes, there will be some subtle difference and a few different tweaks and added customization on one ROM that you won’t find in the other one but, Android has matured and any stable release of a custom ROM will do you just fine.
Here’s my opinion, if you want to drastically change the look and feel of your Android device, maybe custom ROMs are not the thing for you. They’re all similar. Luckily, in the spirit of changing your entire OS, pioneered by MIUI, if your device runs a mainstream chip from Qualcomm, you might want to look at GSI and sGSI builds.
GSI and sGSI is a fancy way of saying Ported ROMs . Since Google debuted its Project Treble, creating ports has become relatively easy as this new way of building Android firmware effectively decouples the low level code like kernels and driver’s from the ROM itself, allowing those to be installed separately as Vendor firmware. I’m not a coder so apologies if I simplified that to a fault.
Amog747 is a well known developer who has brought Poco F1 users builds like a Ported OnePlus 6T ROM and a Pixel 4 XL build. These, are way more interesting than Evolution X, Pixel Experience, Resurrection Remix, Corvus or any other stock Android-based ROM.
Geekville Kenya 