Do you have a friend that can’t stop talking about his Nexus phone? Well, there's a lot to like about the clean, bloatware-free approach of stock Android. But if we look beyond the nerds who care about all this stuff, for most people stock Android isn’t the holy grail when they’re buying a smartphone. In fact, if you were to take a peek at some of the customised versions of Google’s open-source operating system, there are some very interesting features that may make stock Android appear inadequate. So ignoring the sometimes gaudy, sometimes gimmicky aspects of these custom UIs, we pick some genuinely usable features found on Android phones made by popular manufacturers.


Fingerprint User Binding on Coolpad phones
Since Android 5.0 Lollipop, we’ve had access to multi-user mode on Android. Coolpad phones that run a custom Android skin dubbed Cool UI makes an interesting use of this feature — with Fingerprint User Binding. Say, somebody other than you uses your phone in the house. You can create a user account for that person and bind their fingerprint from Settings, and bind yours to the primary (admin) profile.

Now, when you unlock the phone with your finger, the phone shows all your apps, data and settings. If the other person unlocks the phone with their finger, a completely new user profile opens. This creates an extremely frictionless way for other people to use your phone, without having to worry about others accessing your data. It’s no different than the multiple accounts our computers have, with the convenience of easily switching these user profiles using the appropriate fingerprint.