I don’t do much on my phone anymore.

But, I’d like to pitch in with a story from the time when I was involved with the Android-x86 project, and was testing out a bunch of things on their Android distro.

I had a Vaio laptop from 2010 that had the first gen Core i3 in it. Was pretty okay for the time specs wise, and it came with Windows 7. I used that for a while, and eventually replaced it with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat - probably my most favourite version of Ubuntu to date. It had all the right things - Unity, good support for most things - and it was just a joy to use.

Back then, towards late 2011, the Android-x86 team (mainly Chih-Wei Huang, but also a bunch of other folks) were hard at work making Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich stable on x86 architecture. ICS had a lot of things going for it - Google were gearing up for Project Butter (I think that’s what it was called anyway), and ICS was built on the strong foundations of both Honeycomb and Gingerbread, which meant that of course it was pretty decent to use on large screen devices.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s in my country, we were just seeing the rise of Internet in the form of 3G and CDMA dongles - they weren’t fast, but they were good enough. This was also the start of the 3G revolution - smartphones were just coming out with support for 3G bands, and by smartphones, I mean Nokia S40 and S60 (v3 and v5) phones, with a couple of Samsung Galaxy SIIs thrown in here and there. Data plans were usually at a premium - 1 Gigbyte of data cost about 15 USD, which meant I needed to make a wise choice in deciding which operating system I wanted to download.

I happened to choose Android-x86, and it so happened that I would not have access to another PC or that much data for the next couple of years.

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So what did I use on that Vaio that ran Android-x86 ICS? In no particular order:

• I did taxes, and paid bills
• I booked movie tickets, and ordered food
• I did a bunch of reading on the Kindle app, and on Aldiko
• I browsed a bunch of forums I frequented back then and made posts, replied to them and so on. This was mostly done on the Tapatalk app, but also on the ICS browser (yes, we had a separate browser from AOSP prior to the switch to the ARMv7 and v8 platforms and Google’s release of Chrome)
• I tagged a bunch of my MP3 files using an audio signature app that mostly got it right

For more hardcore stuff, I was also involved with a few projects in the Samsung Galaxy Y ROM scene, and I helped by testing out the ROMs on my Galaxy Y. I would download the ROM on the Vaio through the browser, use a file manager I was familiar with from my days in Symbian called Xplore to move it over from the Vaio to the Galaxy Y, then flash the ROM on the phone through Creeds version of the Samsung recovery. Oftentimes, I would need to make quick edits to the ROMs themselves by editing manifest files or oftentimes the install script for the ROM itself.

I used to use Picsay Pro editor for editing and touching up a bunch of images. All of them would get backed up on Google+ and this carried on into the Google Photos era, and eventually ended up living in Drive when Google axed the Photos free forever plan.

I used Tasker quite heavily to automate a bunch of things TBH. Back when root was a very easy thing to acquire, I would periodically backup chats from WhatsApp on my Galaxy Y, and upload it to an FTP server on the Vaio. I had a Tasker script firing on both devices at around the same time, and it used to work like a charm much before WhatsApp eventually got around to rolling out chat backups. I used Tasker to run a task to export my contacts and SMS to the phone storage.

This also being the golden era of ROMs, I used to use Titanium Backup on both my Vaio and the Galaxy Y to have a very identical setup of apps. This meant that for apps that didn’t have a cloud sync feature (which to be fair was most apps), I’d backup and transfer backups to and from the device to ensure I was working with the same set of data. I didn’t do this for all apps because the process is tedious, but yeah. Titanium Backup was also great for very quickly setting up a new custom ROM with the exact same settings as the old ROM.

I used ICS on that Vaio for almost 2 years. I used it until my first week of Uni, and I eventually switched to Linux on that laptop until I replaced it with a MacBook.

Using Android on a computer made me realize a lot of things: Android is a damn capable OS, and its vast majority of applications enrich the experience very very much. There’s almost nothing that you can’t do on Android that a computer can’t, especially when it comes to general computing needs. Android might have been built with phones in mind, but Google have put in a ton of work to make that transition over to bigger screens very smooth - I still firmly believe that Honeycomb was one of their best releases, right alongside KitKat. Both very polished Android offerings, and set the basis for a lot of things that we still use on modern Android today.

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Since that time running Android on a computer, my Android based computing needs aren’t that great TBH. I rarely use my phone these days, and since I switched from my Mi A1, I haven’t really tinkered with Android much.

I still fondly recall a lot of things that made Android dear to me - like Xposed, Titanium Backup, Magisk, CyanogenMod, LineageOS, omniROM, the rise and fall of the Android modding scene on XDA Developers and the growth of some great devs like AChep (creator of AcDisplay), Paul Henschel (Paranoid Android), Francisco Franco (Franco Kernel dev), and many many more.

For me, Android will still remain one of the best computing experiences that most people can and will have. It will probably also be the first ever computing experience for the newer generations, and I think Android is poised beautifully to capture and enthrall generations of users to come.