My experience with the Moto E4 ($40 budget phone)

Community Blog
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I used to be an android user for quite a while when I was going through high school, I had so much fun rooting and putting custom ROMs on phones. I remember flashing random ROMs in math class, trying to overclock the CPU in the phone or doing goofy stuff with the CPU governors.

Honestly I wouldn’t even use it half the time, it would just be me tweaking/playing with it. Trying to disable random services and programs, trying to get the phone to perform better.

Eventually I ended up switching to an iPhone because I wanted to be locked down so I couldn’t break my damn phone all of the time haha. Of course, I always fixed it but I just needed to get the temptation away from me.

So I work at Wal-Mart wireless, it’s the prepaid phone section of Wal-Mart. I sell prepaid cell phone cards and cell phones to some really weird people. It’s always super interesting to be able to play with these super cheap phones. We’ve got anything from crappy $30 ZTE phones with terrible screens to $600 phones available for purchase for these prepaid carriers.

One day I was setting up a phone for this lady and I saw that Motorola had a phone on sale for Verizons prepaid for about $40. This phone was the Moto E4. To think that a 40 dollar phone has a quad core, nice screen, 2gb of ram and even a finger print sensor blew my mind. So I had to have it.

Using the phone is such a good experience compared to the heavily skinned ROMs and bloatware of Samsung and LG. It’s a relieve to see that I can actually use the phone without being bothered by so much random garbage. The phone seems to run a really clean version of Android and the animations are smooth and fluid. Performance is very snappy and honestly I could daily drive this phone without an issue.

Sure, the camera isn’t that good and the speakers on the phone are garbage. But to get an experience that isn’t laggy and well above usable is amazing. Especially since a new flagship phone could run you 700-1000 dollars.

I eventually got bored with the phone, since the root community/ROM community is non existent. So I decided to make a video on it and I will eventually be giving it away in another video.

My videos are terrible and my entire channel is a shitpost. Watch the video if you’re bored enough.

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Thanks for sharing.

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I always find joy in getting a phone like this and trying to unlock the bootloader and get around all of the proprietary crap and limitations that it came with. Part of that is finding a phone with no community and bringing one to it by contributing to the development, or even going alone. That’s the biggest benefit to custom ROMs IMO. Android is an open source project, so custom ROMs and kernels that are open source (in which most are on XDA) allow me to audit the code and build my own project with the added benefit of privacy, knowing that there’s no backdoors or adware/uninstallable apps injected in to the ROM. Couple that with encryption, a re-locked bootloader and a blank recovery partition and its nearly impossible for anyone to get in to the phone as long as you’re running an up-to-date Linux kernel with the latest android security patches. That’s why I’ve always stuck with android, I have high standards for privacy and freedom :wink: