Chasing the Nexus Spirit in 2025

I recently found myself staring at my Motorola Edge (2021), a phone I had unlocked and rooted — not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Rooting isn’t just about adblocking or unlocking performance tweaks. For me, it has always been about something deeper: control, ownership, and curiosity. But as I looked at my phone, I felt... nothing. It was "fine." It worked. But it wasn’t fun anymore.

And then it hit me: I missed the days when phones were fun.

I go back to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus — my gateway drug into the world of custom ROMs, kernels, and Titanium Backup. It wasn’t just about making the phone faster or leaner. It was about shaping it into something personal. I ran CyanogenMod, Paranoid Android, and experimented with kernel governors like it was a science project. I obsessed over screen-on time like I was tuning a race car.

That phone led to the Nexus 5, which I still consider one of the greatest Android devices ever made. It hit that sweet spot of price, performance, and modding potential. I rooted it on day one. I flashed everything from FrancoKernel to Xposed modules. When I moved to the Nexus 5X, I spent hours mapping gestures to the fingerprint scanner just to make the phone more one-hand-friendly.

I even had both generations of the Nexus 7 tablets, which became playgrounds for testing ROMs and kernels. I skipped the Nexus 6 and 6P, but found myself falling in love with the Essential Phone years later — what I saw as the spiritual successor to Nexus. Same-day updates, fast bootloader unlock, GCam support, and clean software. It wasn't perfect, but it was mine.

And then... things changed.

Phones became safer, shinier, and somehow duller. Root detection became the norm. Bootloaders became harder to unlock. OTA updates started breaking everything. And slowly, I found myself using my rooted phone less — not because it was less capable, but because it no longer felt worth it.

I started going back to my laptop and desktop PC. There, I still had control. I could be admin/root, install what I want, tweak, break things, fix them again — all without tripping digital tripwires. I noticed the same behavior in others: fellow tinkerers retreating from Android back to the comfort of true computing.

And maybe it’s not just about phones. I’ve become increasingly wary of where ownership is headed. I prefer physical copies of games, media, even books. I want to support developers and creators, but I also want to own what I buy — not rent it under corporate terms. It feels like we’re shifting into a world where your access is leased, your data is borrowed, and your devices aren’t really yours.

But recently, while browsing unlocked phones on Amazon, I stumbled across POCO and Xiaomi devices. I’ve always been aware of them, but honestly, I’d brushed them off in the past — mostly because of MIUI. I’ve always been more of an AOSP purist. Clean, minimal, and to-the-point — not the heavily skinned experience that MIUI represents. But something about seeing those phones again, with their bootloader unlock options and active dev scenes, stirred up a bit of that old curiosity.

No, I haven’t used one firsthand yet, but it made me realize that maybe there are still phones out there that let you dive deep. Devices that still offer the kind of openness we used to take for granted. And maybe it’s not about the brand or the specs — maybe it’s just about finding something you can tinker with again. Something you can make yours.

Maybe the Nexus program is long gone, but its spirit doesn’t have to be. It lives on in open tools, communities, and in the refusal to settle for default. It lives on in people like us — the ones who flash recovery images for fun, who still get excited over kernel changelogs, who believe that owning a device should mean something.

So yeah — I might just grab a new dev-friendly device soon and go wild again. Because that itch? It never really went away. And neither did the love for this kind of freedom.