Android Phones
When I got my first android smartphone, I was really impressed by everything it could do. I’ve been learning a lot of things related to tech in tinkering with smartphones.
Rooting
I had a dual-core processor, 512 MB of RAM and a really bad camera in my first smartphone. Still, I could search and browse the internet, listen to music and play some games. I really liked the latter. One day at school, I witnessed one friend hacking a game. I really had no idea that we could do this and I didn’t know how either. He wasn’t really patient in explaining how to do it but I really wanted to. He sent me an app; freedom. After installing it, I was getting some weird messages and I couldn’t get to make it work. He told me to go and search about ‘rooting’ once I was home. I don’t really remember how I did it, but I managed to root my phone! I understood how freedom worked. Basically, all in-app purchases in games I played were redirected to freedom and I got everything for free! I thanked the boy the next day and this marked the point in my life when I started getting into tech and learning more.
Flashing ROMs
After rooting my phone, I did way more things than just hack games even though I became acquainted with the likes of game killer and lucky patcher. I changed the boot animation, font, device model and the carrier name of my phone and tinkered a lot with its software side. Then, one day I got a Galaxy S7 Edge. It was by far the best phone I had used and I loved its specs. Of course, I rooted it. I had installed the Xposed framework on my previous phone but the latter lagged a lot due to the number of plugins I had put on it. Nonetheless, in hope of finding something useful, I browsed and searched the XDA Developers Android forum. I came upon ‘ROMs’ and I did my research to know what they were. Turns out, another version of Android, be it an official or a custom one, could be flashed on some phones and I really loved the idea because of all the new features that were then obtained. I did my research on how to ‘flash’ the ROM that interested me most for my phone; the Superman ROM. I managed to boot into download mode on my phone, flashed an image of TWRP and finally flashed the Superman ROM. I absolutely loved everything about it. It had no major issues, offered a lot of functions to tweak the software or hardware and the apps that came along really changed my experience. The customizeability made me love Android more. I could change the statusbar icons, their placements or color and put logos kind of everywhere. The boot animation was pretty handsome and it was easy to do everything that I just mentioned. The S7 Edge also had unique camera modes and the themes were sick! I still flash ROMs but they all have some bugs and don’t offer the amount of features and customizeability that the Superman ROM did.
What I learnt
For years, I’ve been doing research on the hardware inside of computers and smartphones in thirst of knowledge and understanding. I actually thought ROM and Internal Storage were the same thing. I now know the difference between the two. I learnt about processor cores, threads, cache and architectures (x86, ARM, etc) and various other stuff such as RAM, PCI-E lanes, GPUs, BIOS and how most of the hardware function.. I also understood the link between transistors, capacitors and the various components of a motherboard. To this day, I’m still researching and trying my best to understand how everything works.