My favorite custom Android ROM is dead

Summary

• The Pixel Experience ROM has officially been sunset, leaving the project’s future uncertain.
• The ROM brought new life to aging devices seeking a Pixel-like experience.
• While Pixel Experience may no longer be actively developed, its open-source nature leaves room for possible continuation by a different team.

The heydays of custom ROMs are long behind us, but there are still some great ROM options out there if you’re not happy with your phone’s software situation. As a big fan of the Pixel software design and features, there was one that stuck out over the years for me — the Pixel Experience ROM. It’s a custom ROM that aims to bring devices as close to the original Pixel experience as possible, and it’s the ROM that managed to breathe some more life into my aging Nexus 6P back in the day.

Sadly, the days of the Pixel Experience ROM may be over. Pixel Experience founder José Henrique has announced that the project is sunsetting. While current builds will remain available, there will be no active development going forward.

In the announcement, Henrique shares that since he founded Pixel Experience back in 2017, the world has changed a lot, and that he has decided to end development with that in mind. He doesn’t go into specifics, so this could be either a personal decision or him alluding to the companies making it more and more difficult to run custom ROMs on phones.

In the comments, many people express their gratitude for the project and share how the Pixel Experience ROM fixed both major problems and minor inconveniences with their devices.

The writing has been on the wall for a while. Pixel Experience was relatively late to launch an Android 14-based build of its ROM, only reaching a beta version in late February this year. Back then, project members already alluded to the impending shutdown of the ROM. According to the Android 14 announcement post, Henrique “decided to take a small step down from the tough and time-consuming work of updating the android source code, to focus on his job and life. He is still a very big and integral part of Team PE, but now, in a slightly smaller capacity.”

The project is open-source, so it might live on

Phones sure have changed a lot over the years — Nexus 6P, Nexus 4, and Pixel 7 Pro next to each other

It’s likely that the team didn’t see a way to continue running the project with the desired quality and scale without the lead at the helm. Not all is lost, though. With the project remaining available to download under an open-source license, it’s possible that some other team will swoop in and continue working on the project under a different name. Given the dwindling number of custom ROMs and enthusiasts using them, only time will tell whether someone is going to pick up where the Pixel Experience team left off.

With that in mind, I’m still happy that Pixel Experience existed when it was needed the most, back in the days of shorter software update windows and a more fragmented Android market.