AreaRom10 is THE Ultimate ROM for the Moto E, PERIOD!

Yesterday I had to travel to Boston, and I woke up late. I had a train to catch at 3:05, although I thought it left at 2:49 for some reason, and I woke up at 2:30. I grabbed my briefcase and proceeded to sprint to the train station, as the phrase "catching a train" took on new meaning to me. I was in such a rush that I did not realize I left all my USB cables at home. That sucks, because with the rooted stock ROM, I have had problems with wifi tethering, and I needed a secure internet connection for my computer while on the train. (I don't trust public WiFi if I can help it!)

I spent most of the train ride trying to figure out why tethering has been such a pain to set up, and although I learned a lot about the way Android KitKat allows carriers to hijack DNS queries and makes it difficult to set up tethering, transparent proxy's, and many other things, I decided that I am totally sick of messing around with various settings and tweaking everything myself. So I decided to give installing a custom ROM another shot when I got home.

This time, I opted to go with AreaRom10 for the Moto E, from AndroidArea51. I've had good luck with these developers ROM's in the past, and it seems that every other ROM for this phone (including Cyanogenmod) that I have tried breaks mobile data functionality. That bug limits me to WiFi, which is simply unacceptable because there are many times when I need an internet connection on the road. The ROM is based on KitKat 4.4.4, yet features like App Ops still work flawlessly (see my previous posts for terminology explanations). I did not even have to mess around with the APN settings to connect to the mobile network (although I did have to adjust the MMS settings, I'll get to that later).

I am so happy that I made the decision to go back to AreaRom! After flashing Arearom10, I performed a factory reset through TWRP, as instructed by their website. I then rebooted the device. After the annoying boot-loader unlock warning disappeared (which I am replacing with something cooler right now), a pretty impressive looking boot animation appeared, resembling wispy smoke patterns in high definition (or something like that). It was immediately apparent to me that the Area51 developers spent a lot of time on this ROM, because everything from touch screen responsiveness, to the awesome theme was so much better than the stock ASOP.

I signed into my Google account, and all of my apps, contacts, and data were restored without any issues. The ROM runs smoother than the rooted stock with Xposed I was using, and most of the Motorola bloat was already removed, except for a few applications that may actually be useful at some point. Although a couple of dump apps like "Ebay" and "RocketPlayer" were included, this is not a problem, as I simply removed them via Titanium Backup. It also came pre-installed with the Xposed framwork and GravityBox, the ROM is totally deodexed, and everything just works!!! I installed XPrivacy, fine tuned the permissions, reset my encryption keys, and now I am back in business. I cannot believe how painless this ROM has been to set up, and I really wish that I had installed it weeks ago, as it would have saved me a lot of headache...

Transparent proxy functionality with Orbot is now completely working after installing a custom IPTables app, and besides the firewall rules, no further configuration was needed. Tethering works perfectly out of the box, and it seems that the ROM has even fixed the evil DNS hijacking that either Google or my carrier has implemented. The only things that I have not managed to get working yet is my LUKS partition, SSH port forwarding proxy, and I still cannot seem to connect to my OpenVPN server from my computer when tethering. I may need to create a TCP protocol VPN for this phone. I am assuming that AT&T blocks UDP streams or something, maybe in an effort to stop people from using Bittorent, because OpenVPN worked flawlessly when I was on Verizon's network. However, these are all minor issues that I will find workaround’s for in due time.

In conclusion, if you are a frustrated GSM Motorola E user, I would highly recommend that you unlock your boot-loader and install AreaRom right now. You will not be disappointed. I am actually quite shocked that AndroidArea51 does not get as much recognition as the other ROM's available on XDA (which are buggy, at least in my experience). These guys really know their sh*t, are devoted, and have literally saved my life on almost every Android device I've owned.

May the Source be with you! Thank you AndroidArea51!