Motorola owners would have found out by now that their phones either no software updates or very slow updates to major android versions. And owners of G-Lineup of phones now only get 1 major update and my G5 plus picked up Oreo late in 2018 and a few months after that security updates stopped too. So people who wanted to experience Android Pie had to go the custom ROM route and in a positive note there are lots of custom ROM’s for moto G5 plus available.
After searching around the net and reading reviews I zeroed in on Pixel Experience ROM mainly due to its stable build and positive reviews. My nephew helped in installing the ROM as I have zero experience of that before this and this guide helped us a lot. Making sure TWRP version is important as we encountered a error while installing the ROM which was due to the incorrect version of TWRP. And the other important point to note this process voids the warranty and this works only when the G5 plus has original Android 8.1 ROM from motorola on it.
The installation took 10 minutes at the most and setting up the phone was straight forward. Make sure the data on your phone was backed up as this process deletes all the data from your phone’s internal memory. Once the phone was all set up I was pleasantly surprised how fluid the Pixel Experience ROM and as the name suggests you get a full “Pixel like Experience” with the now infamous GCam app preloaded.
I used this ROM for a month or so and the experience was generally very good with battery life better than the stock ROM and the camera producing better images. But what made me go back to the stock ROM was the 4G “VOLTE” network was very erratic and I somehow felt the data speeds on mobile network and WiFi was slow when compared to the stock ROM and the general feeling that somehow the ROM was not fully optimized for this phone. Now that’s my opinion about this ROM but I will still recommend for anyone who wants to experience Android Pie on Moto G5 Plus….