My Nexus 6P was decommisioned for two reasons: battery time was not good enough to last me a full working day, and performance was not as good as I needed. So it was replaced with a Oneplus 6 as a daily driver, and relegated to being the control unit for my iEast Audiocast modules.

As a fun project, and in the spirit of reusing and recycling instead of simply writing off what is actually still good hardware, I decided it would be time to replace the battery and flash a new custom rom.

The original OEM battery was ordered through Ebay for little money, and the iFixit toolkit, ordered for another problem, is waiting to attack that problem. While waiting for that, we dive back into the world of custom roms at xda-developers.com.

A simple, stp-by-step how to on unlocking the bootloader, rooting the device, and flashing a rom was found:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/general/guides-how-to-guides-beginners-t3206928

And the Pixeldust rom I used can be found here:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/development/rom-pixeldust-android-10-angler-t4080291

It’s a direct port of the rom for Google Pixel phones, so a quit clean Google Android experience. And it is currently being maintained!

Some important notes:

• Flash Magisk immediately after flashing TWRP recovery, otherwise it won’t stick
• Booting the rom for the first time takes very long. Be patient.