Way back in the day, custom ROMs were popular not just for privacy but also for boosting speed. Android wasn’t quite as polished, and if a phone was loaded with bloatware installing a new ROM (such as the old Cyanogenmod) could help to boost speed. Which made us wonder – is the same true today?
We decided to perform a test using our Moto G8 Power. We started by using the default Android installation straight out of the box. To gauge performance we used Geekbench 5, which measures CPU and memory performance. We did not install any additional apps or change any settings. After running Geekbench, our phone gave a respectable score of 243.
Next we installed HavocOS (based on LineageOS) along with a few basic apps like F-droid, the Aurora store, and GCam that we put on every phone we sell. No other apps were installed, and no settings changed.
With a de-googled phone, Geekbench showed a score of 304. That’s a 25% increase in performance just by installing a de-googled ROM!
De-googling your phone gives you more than just privacy, it also boost your phone’s speed thanks to removing all the bloatware, plus other optimizations at the OS level.