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Your warranty is now void. I am not responsible for bricked devices, dead SD cards, thermonuclear war, or you getting fired because the alarm app failed. Please do some research if you have any concerns about features included in this ROM before flashing it! YOU are choosing to make these modifications, and if you point the finger at me for messing up your device, I will laugh at you.
- XDA’s copypasta that was often used for custom ROM pages.
I remember the first time I decided to try to flash a custom ROM. The phone I had was a very awful M4 SS4045 Style, which is a smartphone from a brand that was pretty much created by the largest mobile carrier here, as a way to get more into the low end market, by buying and reselling very cheaply phones that were near ewaste. I remember how shitty that phone was, it barely had 1GB of RAM, and the internal storage was a pathetic 4GB, and the worst part is that, the storage was split up in two sorta partitions, between the system itself (it got like, 2 GB) and the user files (also another 2 GB). While SD cards were a thing, and this phone very much did had one, I don’t remember most apps actually supporting installing to external storage, which meant you had play Jenga with the storage you’re given. Being someone who used both Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp, this was easier said than done. Even back then, Facebook was already becoming a bloated mess, becoming nearly 400 MB in size, which is pretty awful for 2015 standards.
I had so much issues with installing apps due to the lackluster storage, so I started researching for solutions for this very annoying problem. This would eventually lead me to finding a Youtube video of some guy installing a custom ROM called CleanKat, which apparently removed the storage splitting, so now the system was able to access those 4GB in their entirety. I also found out about Xposed, which was a sorta framework that allowed you to run mods over Android, which were made by the community. I remember finding many mods that allowed me to tweak Android KitKat, and it allowed me to really make my phone my own thing. I would make the back panel transparent, I would change the font to fucking Comic Sans because why the fuck not! I would run stuff like audio mods, supposed battery mods, whatever, in order to squeeze the most I could from my phone. I also had my phone rooted for a while, and I would fuck around with custom kernels and overclock the shit out of this phone (if I remember correctly, I was running an overclock of 1.7GHz on a Moto G4 Play, which was a phone that had a stock clock speed on the CPU of like, 1.2GHz? I forgor, lmao) However, the thing that called out to me the most is the fact that you could install newer custom ROMs on devices that never had any updates, ever, or devices that were stuck on a certain version because the manufacturer didn’t give an shit about its users. For me, custom ROMs were a way to get newer Android versions running on decrepit or abandoned hardware. It was a way to get certain features that were locked away to certain phones (like on Pixel Experience). It was also a way to debloat your phone as well. It later became a way to regain a semblance of privacy, in an era where absolutely everything is working to collect your data as fast as they can. (I am also surprised how faster a phone boots up now without Google services, which kinda shows how slow and bloated Google Play Services is nowadays, lmao. A thing to think about, mayhaps.)
Anyways, I currently have a Oneplus Nord N10, and I been meaning to get a newer ROM installed here for a long while now. Currently the thing is running a semi-abandoned (so called “official”) version of LineageOS based off Android 14, and the community surrounding this phone has done work on getting a newer, shinier, version of LOS running on Android 16, which can be found here. From what I was able to gather, a number of major issues were fixed: the slow charging issue this phone had on custom ROMs was finally fixed, the inability to use any of the other camera lens was also fixed, among other things. Android 16 itself has some other neat features, like resizable Quick Settings tiles (my god they took this long?), and some security features here and there, but realistically, I would’ve stayed on Android 14, because it worked, and it was okay for the most part. But the rumors of actual working fast charging were too tempting to not do anything about it, so I decided to start backing up everything and got started on getting everything downloaded and ready, and I put some time aside on the weekend too do actually do the thing.
getting everything ready, and backup/restoring on android sucks
The worst part of Android really always has been the backing up process. The way backup works on a stock Android phone, is with this backup utility, called Google One. The way this tool works is that you backup all your apps and stuff to Google servers, but in my experience it would almost never fully work they way you want it to. Sometimes it would restore the home screen background for you, even the launcher if you were lucky (but it seemed to never save any fucking settings, lmao), it would download apps for you, but it rarely if ever restored any in-app settings. During my time with fucking around with custom ROMs, I would eventually find out that Google’s restore tool sometimes would save different backups for different versions of Android, and sometimes would not allow you to use the backup made on Android A on Android B, or vice versa. This kinda bit me in the ass when I was trying Android 9 on an old phone years ago, and once I went back to Android 8, I realized that the backup it saved was over 3 or so months ago, and Google did not allow me to use the Android 9 backup for reasons. Since the restore tool almost never restores any in-app settings, you are now left with the arduous task of going app to app, and then setting it up manually, and if I was lucky, the app would allow me to export my settings in a little JSON file or whatever, which would be something that hopefully past Lug already probably saved or whatever, and if that was the case, I would restore that backup instead. I remember that I often started with the launcher, I would export the layout to a file, and then I would continue backing up everything else, music players, gallery viewers, X, Y, or Z app, whatever.
I think by far the worst thing to do when setting up a fresh install of Android, is logging in to all your apps, which is my bane of my existence and it only got worse the moment I started taking password security more seriously with a password manager and a 2FA app. Every time I wanted to set up Android, it was a good 2 hour process where I would end up waiting for every app to install itself, once that was finished, I went app to app, and signed in individually, going back and forth from my password manager and 2FA app, and of course it was a miserable experience. Sometimes the autofill worked, but most often than not it didn’t, so now I needed to switch to the password manager and copy my credentials that way. I also had to switch back and forth to the 2FA app whenever the app required a 2FA code. Yes, split screen is a thing, but it is jank, and switching from app to app was very annoying.
After I ditched Google services on this phone, the obvious backup solution now was of course Seedvault, which is a backup solution that LineageOS has built in. I like Seedvault because it actually backs up the individual APK files into its backups, which means you can go ahead and restore and have a semi-functional phone working again without waiting for the 2 hour long reinstall process that Google’s backup tool took because it stored everything on the cloud. I also really like you can directly backup your system to a USB drive, or a server you may have. Seedvault even saves most app settings inside the backup itself, which was actually awesome, and made stuff so much more easier. But there always is that one app that doesn’t like the restore process, and would lead me to having additional issues, like not opening. You’ll hear more about this, later, lmao.
I also want to shame an app for being dogshit when to comes to backups, and that app is Whatsapp. First of all, I fucking hate Whatsapp, and it is an app I wish I didn’t have to keep on my phone, but sadly, I need to keep it on here, because everyone here uses Whatsapp, and no one knows or acknowledges any other alternatives (and I am sure is hell not gonna pull up to the work chat and say “hey guys let’s use signal instead!”, lmao.). Whatsapp sucks and it is infested by AI at this point, but yeah that will be another topic for another day. The way backups are handled in Whatsapp is that you are expected to connect your Google account to your phone, and the app should be able to backup everything to Google Drive. On a normal, stock phone with a stock ROM, this should be beyond easy, but on degoogled phones? Yeah, not so much. I heard some people have tried using microG to bridge the gap that is required to allow Whatsapp to backup to Drive. Sadly, it doesn’t work, or at least not on my phone. In my case, it wasn’t able to sign in, or find an account on the device, even though I was actually signed in inside microG.
By default, Whatsapp should be able to make a local backup in the
folder
Internal Storage/Android/media/com.whatsapp/Whatsapp, and
it can use that folder to restore messages, should the app get
uninstalled or something happens to the app that forces the user to
reset it or whatever. It is not intended to be copied and moved
somewhere else, but hey, it won’t know the difference, lmao. Also, I am
quite surprised Syncthing was able to access this folder, considering
how annoying Google has been with restricting access to the Android
folder in the last couple years, I was expecting the ballcrushing “FoR
YoUr pRiVaCy, ChOoSe a dIfFeReNt fOlDeR” error, but Android actually
allowed Syncthing to access that folder, lmao. With that, I was able to
set up a constant sync that I can keep in the case I lose this phone or
decide to wipe and start over. And when it is time to format and
reinstall ROMs, I can simply grab a USB drive, plug it to my phone, and
copy everything over. Once everything is reinstalled, you move the files
back, and Whatsapp should be able to figure everything else from
there.
actually getting the thing installed
I remember back in the day I used to use this tool called Minimal ADB and Fastboot. Nowadays I just use the tools provided by Google, which are pretty decent for the most part. I forgot I didn’t have drivers for my phone to use fastboot with, but I already had a recovery installed. This was not intended to be used with LOS 23, but I decided to try it anyway, because why not, lmao. Installing LOS 23 on this recovery caused the recovery to complain that the signatures did not match, which was to be expected, but at least it was able to get it installed. After the reflashing was finished, It was now time to reboot the phone, and start setting everything up again. Restoring Seedvault was surprisingly painless. Some apps failed to install, like Whatsapp, but I could reinstall those later, meanwhile other apps, like Proton Mail and I think Aliucord (a Discord modded client) either didn’t work or would also fail to open at all. Unlike on the official LOS 21, Google Maps also fails to load the in-app map. Most settings were restored without any issues, at least. There were the issues I did expect, like Syncthing complaining about no folder markers, because the folders themselves were deleted after the factory reset required to flash a new ROM.
After fucking around for a couple of minutes, I started to realize
there was some issues with the OS. Whatsapp was not able to sign in,
Aliucord didn’t like the OS for whatever reason, and would simply fail
to start up. Ironfox wasn’t able to connect to Tailscale’s tailnet
(meanwhile this did work on Cromite). I started to suspect the whole
flashing the ROM with the recovery that was never intended to be used
with the thing was a mistake, so I decided to get the recovery reflashed
and the OS reinstalled. As mentioned before, my main PC does not have
the drivers I need for talking to the phone while it is in fastboot mode
(and I didn’t want to install some random ass EXE file), so I grabbed
that Linux laptop I have and installed the platform-tools
there, and saw that the laptop was actually able to see the device, and
after running fastboot flast recovery recovery.img in the
terminal, the laptop was able to successfully install the recovery image
to the phone. I was actually surprised this worked out of the fucking
box, lmao.
Sadly, even with the correct recovery and a whole ass reinstall, things were still wonky. Whatsapp still didn’t want to load, so this time, I decided to be like “fuck it” and went on to reinstall the damn thing from scratch, so I decided to go on and do a full clean install and see if that was the issue. After doing that, welp, I found the issue. It seems to be something having to do with the backup I have on hand, which caused Whatsapp never progressing to the next step for verification. To be honest, I am not particularly happy with this install of LineageOS. I found quite a number of issues cropping up from the reinstall. Molly (a Signal fork) didn’t want to work, because it wasn’t able to use SMS somehow, Whatsapp also had the same issues with sending SMS messages, which I manage to fix by reflashing the OS and omitting the restore settings option. Google Maps stopped working now, and while it isn’t a big loss, it is concerning. Another annoying thing I ended up running into is the fact Musicolet’s premium version cannot activate itself, so now I am locked into the free version permanently. I feel that I am sabotaging myself with using that Seedvault backup. Like, it is from a LineageOS build that is 2 Android versions behind, with a completely different build signature, with backups of APKs for apps that were intended to be for Android 14, who knows. I think I do plan to do a full ass reinstall, maybe this time go app by app, and install everything manually.
tangent 1: lug reviews android 16
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Android 16 is an okay version of Android. Nothing to be excited about, aside from maybe some minor (and I say, really minor) changes to the UI and everything. Really the only reason I installed this ROM is because the fast charging seems to be fixed, and I was able to somewhat verify that it was actually fixed, with some very non scientific charging tests. Other than that, I been thinking a lot of Android’s new UI design direction. Material Design You (or whatever it is called) is nice, but I feel that all of this was pointless. Like it seems for the past 10 years, Google has been changing Android’s design for what it feels for no reason. You can see it from the quick settings: they went from being flat on Android 7, they changed the background’s color to white on Android 8, they put everything inside circles on Android 9, 10, and 11, and then they were like “oh yeah let’s put everything in fucking pills” and now the nice and dense quick settings became this horrid waste of space on Android 12, 13, 14 and 15. Android 16 finally lets you resize these quick actions, which I feel it is a thing that should’ve been on Android since Android fucking 12.
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The OS has gone though so many changes on the UI department, and I think the worst era where this happened was during the Android 8 to 12 era, where it seemed that every damn version would change and be refined, and x,y,z thing are moved to a different location, or how certain elements now needed to be a different color, for uhh, seemingly no reason. I feel this has been done as nothing more than a way to keep the UI designers employed. Like, there are no need to change how the font looks or how the icons look or feel, or how element A reacts to B when a certain action occurs. The amount of unnecessary animations now strewn across the operating system is insane, like even dismissing notifications causes the other remaining notifications to be shaken and moved around, dismissing apps from the recents tab also shake, and while these animations look pretty nice I must admit, they make using modern Android on a lower end device feel sluggish, like walking though a mud lake kinda sluggish. Another thing that they decided to remove is the custom fonts thing, which makes me unable to use a more serif font that I tend to prefer, which is a big shame.
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Yet the more I used it, I was pretty enamored at the little animations. When they worked, they kinda do make the experience more slick. I really like the haptic feedback to certain draggable elements, like the volume slider, or the one for brightness, I feel it does a lot to make using your phone more of a physical one, and to make it feel more than just dragging fingers across glass. I also am surprised at the battery life, and it has been pretty decent for the time I been using it. Like, even with heavy use, I seem to be getting roughly the same amount of battery life as on Android 14, which is surprising. Performance wise, the Nord seems to run somewhat faster in some places, however slowdowns still occur time to time, which is to be expected, since the phone at this point is 6 years old now. Occasionally, the phone takes multiple seconds to respond to a recent or home button press, which is kinda annoying, but doesn’t happen that often enough it makes me want to fix it, soooo…
I really do hope there is more work put into this ROM. Rumors around the Nord N10 community hint at a possible official LineageOS ROM soon, apparently there are some major bugs being worked on, and I really hope those bugs are able to be sorted out.
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tangent 2: beastieball is fucking awesome
It is very rare for a game to actually makes me want to get invested, but Beastieball managed to do it. I’ve been putting off playing the game, because I have been very busy and wasn’t feeling like actually worsening the wrist pain I have. But this weekend I decided to do a voice chat with an awesome friend, where I streamed the game and she would give me advice regarding the game. It turned out to be one of the most fun experiences I have experienced in a long while. 10/10 game, play it now like actually, lmao.
page updates
- 2024-04-19: page was created.