@itsclarence Had a few random restarts. The phone may have been doing this with the official ROM. It being a factory refurbish, it may have had a hardware issue? As it was sold on eBay by a 3rd party in China, I am uncertain if it was tampered with.
Holding the phone near my chest then quickly (but gently/non-jarring) pull it away, was causing an instant reboot. Then after pushing something on the notification menu to drag it down (intending to edit), it got stuck in a reboot loop, about 3 seconds after logo appeared, it would reboot. I removed the cover and removed the battery, reinserted, and powered up, everything was stable again.
With cover still off, I tried pushing the battery around and was not able to cause a reboot, so I think the battery fitment is good. Not sure if there’s some loose connector internally, some damaged chip/circuit, a hardware tamper, a software tamper, or an /e/ bug? Perhaps any combination. Not ideal for testing.
The other phone with stock ROM also does the random rebooting thing, though not as often, and it has never gone into a loop and not had the position reboot.
Anyways, there are maybe 6-8 settings related to automatic adjustment of brightness based upon ambient light settings. None of them seem to work. I must always manually adjust brightness, even in pitch black darkness at night, which is annoying. The Reading Mode (turns colors greyscale, extra darkness at night) is forgotten after reboot.
Day/Night Light/Dark theme doesn’t automatically switch. Not sure if I misunderstand the settings.
The excessive amount of similarly named settings is confusing. There are some settings pages which do not respect the dark theme, and present a bright white background menu. There are also several items, like notification icons and menu items, which do not respect the dark theme, and keep black text with a dark background.
A usability issue, organizing the “Home” panel and the one to the left. Samsung Note 3 & 4 had this ability to edit and delete all panels, add or remove entire panels, create empty panels, add and remove any or all widgets. With /e/, the panel to the left has static items that can’t be removed. “Search”, a Weather widget, and I think something else? I want it all removed. Is it possible? Is it possible to create new empty panels? I know I can drag one icon to the right to create a panel, but it is cumbersome to drag the icons. The screen acts fidgety, and the selection and dragging seems to respond a bit erratically.
There was this other issue, when I changed a setting (I forgot the setting, maybe related to brightness?), it dramatically decreased sensitivity to the screen, and made it very difficult to tap on any icon or menu. I had to disable that setting. I will have to try and find that setting again and reproduce.
Some of these things may be simpler usability issues with minor theme edits, probably a good candidate for me to try to fix. Some may be device driver bugs. And some may be hardware malfunctions. I’ll probably focus on things that do not appear to be related to hardware malfunctions (i.e. themes, general usability). Will try to differentiate or verify if the hardware has problems, or if it’s software related, by comparing stock phone with this /e/ OS.
Finally, I do not know how, but if you could point me to resources or instruct me how to build this image from source, I could try tinkering with things. I have Android Studio installed, using Windows 10, on an AMD CPU. I can’t use the AMD virtualization, as I need Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2, which relies on Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtualization Platform, and is mutually exclusive with the Android AMD Virtualization. But it’d probably run fast enough for limited testing, I guess.
I’d like to help, but no idea where to start. I have some programming experience, but no device experience.