I'm Aswin A.S. Kurup, a medicine graduate from Kerala, India, and an alumnus of V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University.

Medicine may have been my degree, but technology — especially Android — has been a constant part of my life.

The Android rabbit hole

My journey started with my first Android phone, the Lenovo Z2 Plus. I quickly fell down the custom ROM rabbit hole: flashing ROMs, experimenting with different setups, following the Android development community, and eventually wondering what actually went on behind the builds I was installing.

That curiosity eventually turned into building ROMs myself.

Over time, I made builds for devices including the Lenovo Vibe K5, Redmi 4X, and Lenovo Z2 Plus. After getting a OnePlus Nord, I started contributing as a ROM source developer for PixysOS.

Later, with the Nothing Phone (1) and Pixel 4 XL, I went deeper into Android development and started working with device sources as well.

That period was probably the point where Android stopped being just a hobby of flashing things and became something I genuinely enjoyed building.

Eventually, though, final-year medicine had other plans. As university got closer to its end, free time became increasingly scarce, and PixysOS eventually ceased to exist.

I started an experimental Android project called MicaOS — an attempt to explore ideas around the platform and build something of my own.

Unfortunately, the same problem caught up with it too: there is only so much time left after medicine, life, and everything else. MicaOS was eventually discontinued, but the experimentation never really stopped.

With the direction of AOSP changing, Google's policy changes, and the increasingly complicated world of Play Integrity, the Android ecosystem isn't quite the same playground it used to be.

So these days, I'm happily daily-driving a bootloader-locked Vivo X200 Pro alongside an unlocked Pixel 7 Pro.

One is for getting things done.

The other is there just in case I get bored.

And knowing me, I probably will.