What phone are you using?

One Plus 8

Are you happy with it? What are its best and worst qualities?

I am happy with the phone. I’ve had it for the past almost 3 years and it has served me well. The thing I love the most about this phone is the specs and the custom ROM community. 3 years later and this phone still holds up very well. It handles everything I throw at it; even the occasional Genshin Impact. The custom ROM community is also very active. My phone is still in good condition after three years. Battery is still holding up. I get about 5-7 hours SOT wifi on light usage. When using data and heavier usage (maps, spotify, max brightness) I get around 3-4 hours of SOT which isn’t that bad for a three year old phone. I plan on replacing the battery and using custom roms to extend my phone’s life.

Which phones have you had previously? Which were the best and worst of the lot?

s5, j7 prime My s5 was a hand me down from my mother. The phone worked fine but the the display would glitch out and turn off. The j7 prime was just garbage after about 6 months of usage. It was laggy as hell and I’m not sure how I survived with that phone for three years. It was definitely the worst out of the two.

How often do you upgrade to a new phone?

I don’t upgrade phones until the one I am currently using cannot handle my daily usage, or breaks. When my phone is no longer usable, then I am considering either going back to samsung or going pixel depending on if the charging and efficiency gets better.

What other Android ecosystem devices do you have? Watches, headphones/earbuds, etc.

I have a galaxy watch active 2 and galaxy buds plus.

Do you also use any Apple products, or are you Android all the way? (And/or Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, etc.)

I do not currently have any Apple products. I am using a windows pc and my laptop is dual booting windows 10 and ubuntu (windows just in case I have software that doesn’t work on linux).

Yup. This has been my go-to weather app for a few months now.

1. YouTube ReVanced - I am on YouTube daily.
2. Ice Raven - Firefox derivative that has Ublock Origin and other useful extensions such as bypass paywalls.
3. Boost for Reddit - Shutting down soon.
4. Gmail - Simple and works for me.
5. Geometric Weather - I check the weather daily, so this app is useful to me.
6. xManager (Spotify) - Mod to get rid of Spotify ads.
7. Neko - Tachiyomi fork for my manga
8. Tachiyomi J2K - Tachiyomi fork for my NSFW doujins
9. Discord - I use it for my anime, gaming, etc. communities.
10. Modded GCam - I use a custom rom on my phone, so I also have a modded gcam which significantly improves over the default camera app of my phone.

Apps that I don’t use daily, but I still find useful.

1. Obtanium - I really only check this app when it notifies me of a new update. Still useful since I don’t have to go to GitHub for each individual app I want to update.
2. F-Droid - Has open source apps.
3. Notion - Useful note-taking app. I use it once a while for school notes that I want to do digitally (I prefer doing notes by hand).
4. Poweramp - Offline music player. I use this when I am going on long road trips and need to put on airplane mode to save battery.

1. YouTube ReVanced - I watch a lot of YouTube.
2. Bitwarden - No need to remember all my passwords and autofill.
3. Iceraven (Browser) - It has uBlock Origin along with other useful extensions.