My experiences with /e/ on a Moto Z2 Play

/e/OS Devices Motorola
1

Hi,
Last week I switched to /e/ coming from the stock Motorola rom (Android Pie). These are my experiences so far:

  • The Android navigation buttons are absent. See this post. I installed an application with similar functionality, but it’s not ideal.
  • Call quality is very poor. Didn’t try to call on speaker or bluetooth yet, but playing music through speaker and bluetooth seems ok. UPDATE: call quality is just as bad through speaker and bluetooth headset.
  • Battery drains (a lot) faster than my previous rom. But this could be a difference between Orea and Pie?
  • When somebody calls me, the zero (‘0’) is missing before the area code. No big deal, just something that I noticed.
  • Chromecast support seems to be missing from some applications (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, NPO (dutch public broadcasting app).
  • Location Services did not work in Google Maps (no problem, I did not intent to keep that application on my phone anyway).

What does work:

Almost everything! Having used LineageOS + microG in the past I expected streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon, Fox Sports GO) not to work at all, but it does. Location services work (except for Google Maps), Audio streaming works (Sonos, Spotify Connect), etc.

If only I could fix call audio and make the navigation buttons re-appear this rom is a keeper for me!

2

After writing the above post I tried some other (GSI) roms, but last month I returned to /e/OS. I fixed the voice/audio issue by flashing the android 8 modem with this firmware (fastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.bin).

For the rest:

*The android navigation buttons are still absent. Instead, Motorola “one button navigation” is enabled, but there is no way to turn it off. The official Motorola app won’t run (“unsupported device”).
*Upon starting Google Maps, it complains that the Google Framework is too old. However, the app still works.
*So far I only found two apps that do not work: “airbnb” and “knab” (banking app).
*No issues with battery life

After all I am really happy with this rom. If only I could find a way to disable Motorola’s one button navigation…

3

UPDATE: I just made the navigation buttons appear by adding qemu.hw.mainkeys=0 to /system/build.prop

Since I did not have root I used this neat trick.

Now I am wondering if the navigation buttons always take up so much space or that I am just not used to it anymore. Are they not supposed to auto-hide sometimes?

4

I’d really like to know who is the guy developing for this phone, as me and one other guy are the ones actually doing the full pie bringup/upgrade. So far the only big problem we have has been IMS not wanting to work. So it would be pretty nice to get another pie rom under this device belt