How to get Stock Android on any Android phone

I am a huge fan of the stock android experience. Sure thing, the manufacturer-tweaked skins have those extra perks like additional functionalities and features, I prefer the no ads, no bloatware stock android experience. 

I also hate the not-so-good looking and dirty icons on other skins. Whereas the stock android experience, features a new and clean looking set of icons, which is awesome.

Stock Android's color palettes and flat Material design are unmatchable. So, here's how to get the stock android on any android phone.

Disclaimer

Note that the experience isn't very exact. Your phone may become slow, There are still quite a lot of things that cannot be replicated until and unless you flash your phone with an AOSP ROM or any other custom ROM. 

But for most of the part, it works really good and the experience is quite flexible and customizable.

Parts of Operating System

Before getting our hands dirty, let's look at the pages of an Operating System, design-wise. Why do we need this? You can yourself customize your device better if you knew what to customize in your phone.

These are the 5 Parts:

• Home Launcher (That includes the home screen and app drawer)
• Quick Settings (Notification Panel)
• Lock Screen
• Application Window
  

The overall look and feel are controlled by these components. Note that font, font size, spacing, text formatting, icons, and etcetera are included in these. These are the 5 basic parts or pages, not components. 

This is not design rules, just my simple principle that I use to make personalization much easier.

However, we can't customize everything, like the Application windows. It depends on the app. Therefore, you can install the google alternatives like Messages, Phone, Gboard, Calendar, Calculator for your default apps like messages, Phone, Keyboard app and etcetera.

If you want to just change the default app icon, then using an icon the pack is more than enough.

However, for the latter people, those who want to use google apps instead of defaults, you can delete the stock apps using ADB (Android Debug Bridge) for which you can check out here.

• Google Contacts 
• Google Messages
• Google Phone
• Google Calculator
• Google Calendar
• Google Photos
• Files by Google
• Gboard

With that being said, let's get our hands dirty.

The Home Launcher

Starting with Home Launchers, there are various options to try out like the Nova Launcher or Lawnchair 2 but I prefer the CPL (Customized Pixel Launcher)

The launcher's great with no bugs, looks surprisingly very stock, fast and smooth and you can even lock any app with a fingerprint. How cool!

There might be other good launchers, but this one's my favorite. It's got some great customisability and moreover, it's ad-free. However, you can support the developer by donating to the app itself. So, download and install the app now!

It looks beautiful with the home launcher itself (With the icon pack). Don't get tempted to stop it from here. There's more good stuff ahead.

The Icon Pack

So, here's how to get rid of those dirty icons and get stock android experience on your phone.

As I told you, the icons don't change with the home launcher. To change the icon styling, install an icon pack. You could download whatever you like, but my favorite is Icon Pack: Google Icons

You can't open it, Just use the CPL to apply it to your device. 

To do that, Go to the home screen, Long press, and head over to Icon Pack. Choose the Google Icons option and voila! A step closer to stock look. So, download and install the app now!

Let's next try to make the volume sliders more stock.

The Volume Sliders 

I use the Volume Styles app (Contains a few to negligible ads) that is free to make the volume sliders look stock. It is modern and great, the only drawback being filled with ads. It's got all the styles you need; From stock android to iOS 14. Nevertheless great. You can use the paid version for more styles and ad-free experience. So, download and install the app now!

And finally, the Quick settings panel.

The Quick settings Panel

I used Powershade, the powerful quick settings panel theming app. It's great, free, and has quite a bit of ad though ( Only on the app ), and got tons of customization features. I won't be using though, because the default style looks convincingly stock android. So, download and install the app now!

Keyboard

As far as the keyboard is concerned, using GBoard is no problem. It gives you a more stock android-y feel, which is what we want. GBoard gives you a hell of a lot of features, including support for a 2D customized sticker, similar to Apple's Memoji, but it's not even half as good. 

There's this touch or swipe typing, which seems far better than the stock keyboard app's touch typing. And the haptic feedback is good enough.

Stock Apps

As I told you, getting all the stock android apps can do the trick for you. Go ahead, install all the stock apps by Google (Above) and replace them with your boring stock OEM's apps. You can also deleted unwanted apps and bloatware from your phone with the help of this post.

Is it worth it?

Is the hard work worth it? Let's find out.

The experience is quite snappy, can't differentiate too easily. The icon pack is okay, it's not very consistent and the quick settings are nice. But, like every other tech, this comes with a few caveats.

The status bar is the same and it sucks. Wish we could customize it. The lock screen is the same old lock screen. It can be changed with an app, but with a catch. You'd have to bypass the system default lock screen, then the app lock screen, which gets annoying at some point.

We've downloaded so many apps just to get the stock Android experience. So, this takes a toll on storage and performance. These apps need to run continuously in the background so the performance and battery life are hugely affected.

This can depend on how well your device can handle multi-tasking and it can depend on your specs and how old your device is. Regardless of your device, we're sure that it can decrease your battery life, performance, and storage.

Even with so many caveats, is it worth it? What I'd suggest is that download only a few apps like CPL Launcher and the Icon pack. This would cover 90% of the stock android experience. However, you can download all the apps for those perfectionists out there, if you can bear those flaws.

Hope you liked it. That's everything I've got for today and I'll catch you up in the next one.