when i was a kid, Android hacking was wild, i made my phone look goofy as fuck, overclocked it to the point of instability, patched games to unlock all the items, hell once I even got a Debian container to run with X11 forwarding....

I jailbroke my ipod and installed a patch that turned my homescreen into a physics engine

Now running containers and VMs on your phone is boring, iOS shortcuts can literally call out to shell scripts running in an x86 interpreter

this is the state of android hacking in 2026

@cas alt text: This is Bob
He knows that play integrity issues exist.
He doesn't keep worrying about play integrity status and enjoys using his phone.
He doesn't pollute Reddit with Play Integrity Screenshots.

Be like Bob

@cas The 2012-2015 Android hacking scene was peak, back then I remember having tried loads of mods and custom ROMs and all that, including cyanogenmod, AOKP, resurrection remix, omnirom, etc. and mods like substratum for theming, I remember about clockworkmod recovery, etc. Samsung wasn't as annoying as they are today regarding installing mods either, you could just boot into download mode, flash whatever you want, and you're all set, no OEM unlock or anything stopping you!

I really miss this era of android hacking

@cas wild to think that 2016 was *checks calendar* a decade ago

@cas nowadays we're just fighting to have the right to install our own apps. Literal *APPS*. While back then you could do literally anything with the whole *OS*. I chose Android over iOS because the hacking scene was this wild. Nowadays, a decade later, I hate android and I hate where it's been going. It became literally the opposite of an open OS with a giant hacking community around it, with only a few projects remaining just to make android bearable, and many apps detecting if you have them installed and refuse to work if so.

@cas android hacking basically went from giant and rewarding to work on, to boring, with google trying to keep as much control over it as possible, and not letting people do what they want.

I was very optimistic when I saw postmarketOS, and today I hope the pmOS hacking scene will become as successful and growing as Android's used to be in the 2010s.

@elly @cas

@cas When I was a kid I... uh... I knew what a "code" was. Its how robots work, right?

@fun @cas haha the expressatt i work on today is from this era and the ur right! the bootloader comes unlocked :D

and same, lots of cool stuff during this time. i think pmOS of today recreated that scene in a much more sustainable way :)

@cas I miss CyanogenMod 7 and the early MIUI ROMs. Spent my entire childhood customizing them in every possible way 🙃

@cas woah, we got casey lore 👀

i never did anything too crazy like that, instead i was always trying to get the latest android update. didnt even know what linux was haha

iirc expressatt was too old for those tweaks, i remember mainly getting tasker, some backup utility, and cyanogenmod

funny to think that 10 years ago i didnt even know what linux was. time flies

wrote up more of my background here:

https://logicalerzor.codeberg.page/blog/how-i-started-using-linux/

@Logical_Error @cas funny to see i'm not the only one who went down the android modding -> postmarketOS pipeline :D

(tried to make a LineageOS port for the Samsung Galaxy Grand Neo, failed, found out about postmarketOS because i wanted to run linux on a different device (Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0), did that and ended up pivoting to mainlining the Grand Neo instead of running newer Android on it :p)

@undefined @cas there’s dozen’s of us! i swear! dozens!

@cas oh my, I actually did daily-drive a 3.0 GHz Nexus 5 for a while.