you don't see normal android around anymore. every phone out there has a likely chance of having a heavily modified version of android. samsung has one UI (which I will say, is the best one out of all the other phone manufacturer's android ROMs), xiaomi has MIUI, asus's zen ui, oppo's coloros and whatever else is out there. now tell me that they look and work the same. no? exactly.

normal android isn't really a thing anymore. we have the pixel but that's not normal android.

over here, I have actually gotten sick of my xiaomi nugget's OS. there are Chinese trackers everywhere, it looks inconsistent with everything else, it fights you when you want it to do something, I've had enough with it.

so I got stock android. regular android. though with minor tweaks.

after going down the android ROM rabbit hole, I found ArrowOS. which is regular android, with the aforementioned minor tweaks and angry devs (see their blog). now this isn't the first time I've done this, I've done this on an ancient xiaomi redmi 1s, which was released in 2014, now running android 7 (apparently can run android 11). but this would be the first time I'm doing it on a relatively modern device.

and it is delightful. things (or most of them) look consistent in their colours, little bloat too. there's actually not much to say about it, other than the fact that it's great using android as it was intended, like how fedora gives the proper vanilla GNOME experience. and yes xiaomi, you don't have to kill every single app at every given moment for battery saving. unfortunately I can't show you anything here, so just take my word for it :))

(never mind the daily post schedule anymore, forget I even said anything about it :/)