IS YOUR MOBILE PHONE SECURE AND FAST?

I was a fan of Apple iPhone since iPhone 3 right up to iPhone 6; it was when Apple iOS 13 released and iPhone 6 won't be officially support on. At that time, when I looked at the cost for another iPhone. I feel it's time for a change, which then I purchase an Android phone.

If we compare price for specification, China made phone will be much affordable; but we need to bear with their software that generally got two main problems, the first problem is that they don't really release software update or patch fast enough; and another problem is bloatware that slows down your phone. This will put us in dilemma.

As of yesterday, I feel that I cannot wait any longer, I have complaint enough to the manufacturer, but looks like they short of saying, if you need updated software, get a new model. So I spent my evening yesterday on this experiment.

First, I tried to unlock the bootloader, but found that the latest version of Android 10 that I use got a bug, so I had to rollback to Android 9 and managed to unlock it after some tweak of installing Microsoft KM-Test Loopback Adapter to hold Network Address parameter and disabling all other network adapters, except for my WiFi connection; after that, I installed a new custom recovery image, there are two commonly used images, either TWRP or OrangeFox, I installed OrangeFox, because of better features and nicer user interface. After I load a new custom ROM, I find some of my phone component is not functioning such as my fingerprint reader; so I flashed my phone with the updated firmware, format back the phone, wipe cache and dalvik-cache; then reapplying the ROM back, I would recommend LineageOS ROM which is now at version 18 for Android 11; at first I found that, there is no official release for my phone, but luckily some developer made a port over. I successfully get it installed together with all the Google Applications using NikGApps.

The beauty of having a custom ROM on our phone is that, we can change those application that comes with the stock with our liking, such as the camera app, calculator and others; we use Android Debug Bridge (ADB) for it.

My phone is now running much better than before, having the latest version of kernel, latest Android, latest security patch, and having all latest applications that I ever need on my phone, without of those nasty app that bugging you with ads and taking up resources.

I encourage those who are technical to get your hand dirty by venturing with this, it's not a straight line ease success, some even brick their phone; it will challenge your technical problem solving skill until you can assemble what you need on a phone as your daily driver. So happy flashing...