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i gave up on gapps

Have you tried TK Gapps? It's the direct successor to PA Gapps. I run Cyanogenmod with TK Gapps' "Pico Modular Package" and I'm quite pleased with it:

"This package is designed for users who want the absolute minimum GApps installation available. In this package you will find the core Google system base, Google Play Store, Google Calendar Sync, and the following Play Store application: Google Play services"

i gave up on gapps

Have you tried TK Gapps? It's the direct successor to PA Gapps. I run Cyanogenmod with TK Gapps' "Pico Modular Package" and I'm quite pleased with it:

"This package is designed for users who want the absolute minimum GApps installation available. In this package you will find the core Google system base, Google Play Store, Google Calendar Sync, and the following Play Store application: Google Play services"

One nitpick, the 'new' kodi youtube add-on cannot download youtube videos. I miss the old add-on, the new one is to this point, inferior.

That's sad. Looks like VideoMonkey is over, too. How about Navi-X? Or you could try YouTube Downloader. No, wait, allow me... hmm, should have just saved the flv, it's downloading ffmpeg so that it can make me an mpg. OK, now it's downloading the video, speed is pretty poky here with my TF201 and my third-rate WISP. I searched and started the download from inside the app, I'll try a shorter video from inside the YouTube app next. ffmpeg is now cranking through this video, looks like a total of two minutes to transcode this 25 MB 480p. I'll try just grabbing a flv next. Kodi or VLC should have no trouble playing either. OK, quality of the MPG is pretty good in VLC. Let's try grabbing a FLV from inside YT now. Without even opening a video, I "share" it (from its menu button in the list) with/via YouTube downloader and choose the FLV from the format menu. Ugh, looks like I got 240p. Plays fine though. Looks better than I would've imagined.

Ok two nitpicks, your victim hotspot isn't going to like your torrent hog.

Set a nice, reasonable rate limit and they're not even going to notice.

Your mail comment is the only thing I agree with.

It's nice to know you're not completely unreasonable.

Try CM12.1 (Lollipop 5.1.1) as an alternative and become independent of Motorola's update policy: Here is a link to the respective threads on XDA!

Android is safer if you root it and abandon the official versions. TouchWiz isn't that good anyway. Every other maker's UI is better than TouchWiz. My S3 was abandoned on an old version of Android, but I'd have to go boot it to see what. So Samsung has a habit of abandoning older generations. And iOS isn't any better, with less than 1 year support for my 3G, about the same as I got on my S3.

Android has the slight edge, because I can root it and go with a generic, or use a maker like Oppo with weekly OS updates, if you want to update that often.

Unfortunately with the new SafetyNet API apps are going to start checking for root/custom ROMs and locking you out of them.

I just upgraded to an S4 recently but after rooting and installing TWRP recovery on the stock kernel, MetroPCS no longer allows OTA updates. I've been playing with different ROMs. Cyanogenmod 12.1 is good but is missing Wifi Calling feature. I also actually miss the Samsung camera app which has more features.

Another ROM similar to CM is Candy5 which has a few more bells and whistles. Another popular one is AICP. The one I'm trying now and actually liking a lot is Albe95 S6 PORT 3.5. It is basically backported Galaxy S6 for the S4.

I just upgraded to an S4 recently but after rooting and installing TWRP recovery on the stock kernel, MetroPCS no longer allows OTA updates. I've been playing with different ROMs. Cyanogenmod 12.1 is good but is missing Wifi Calling feature. I also actually miss the Samsung camera app which has more features.

Another ROM similar to CM is Candy5 which has a few more bells and whistles. Another popular one is AICP. The one I'm trying now and actually liking a lot is Albe95 S6 PORT 3.5. It is basically backported Galaxy S6 for the S4.

I just upgraded to an S4 recently but after rooting and installing TWRP recovery on the stock kernel, MetroPCS no longer allows OTA updates. I've been playing with different ROMs. Cyanogenmod 12.1 is good but is missing Wifi Calling feature. I also actually miss the Samsung camera app which has more features.

Another ROM similar to CM is Candy5 which has a few more bells and whistles. Another popular one is AICP. The one I'm trying now and actually liking a lot is Albe95 S6 PORT 3.5. It is basically backported Galaxy S6 for the S4.

Forget CM, go to XDA and look for other ROMs for your phone.

I would love to know how to do this. Go ahead and call me an idiot, but I've gone through the ROMS for about a day and a half and then asked on the forums for suggestions, but I got no help on that:
http://forum.xda-developers.co...

How does one "look for other ROMs" and know if those ROMs support the needed features? Especially for devices such as the Note which have exceptional hardware that may not be supported in the ROM (S-Pen).

Great if CM support your phone. I've got a Note 2 and there's been no new milestone for a year. In any case isn't this a bug in the Samsung drivers so I'm not sure how CM would be able to fix this one.

Forget CM, go to XDA and look for other ROMs for your phone. Based on a quick glance over the appropriate forum, I suggest Resurrection Remix. Yeah, the names of these things are ridiculous. I'm running something called "KatKiss" on my Asus Transformer Prime. You can have it with a choice of three kernels, two without fsync (internal flash is abysmally slow) and one with. I am using the one with because data is more important to me than a couple more frames per second.

Yeah, MTP has always been a little flaky for me. I usually just use "adb" from the command line.

I have looking for a way to integrate "adb" into Nautilus as a virtual file-system. There is an "adb" FUSE filesystem, but I am not quite sure I like that all that much. So, for now, I recommend getting these scripts instead: http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Also, if you don't want to use Nautilus, there is an "adb" based file manager called aafm. Maybe that's a good solution for some people.

Most security updates aren't hardware specific.

But the system images are. That's kind of the point.

and then Google only promises updates for 18 months

Actually, that's:
- Three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store
- Or, 18 months after the device stopped being sold on the Google Store
For how long does Apple promise to support their handsets?

Apple is currently supporting every phone that has been released since 9/2011

While it is true that the oldest phone Google is directly releasing updates for (Nexus 4) was released on November 13, 2012, the HTC HD2, a Windows phone released in November 2009, has community-released ROMs of Lollipop. Does the iPhone have that? No, the iPhone can't have that. If you want to limit it to official vendor support of devices that originally shipped with Android, we're looking at support dating back to 2010.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/google-wont-fix-bug-hitting-60-percent-of-android-phones/

You do realize that the security hole in question is a bug in WebKit, which is more Apple's than Google's; Blink, which replaced WebKit in Android in 2013, is a fork of WebKit, and the issue has been patched there already. Google hasn't actively developed Apple's WebKit since it forked off Blink. Also, Google didn't say they wouldn't issue a patch, only that they wouldn't write one:

If the affected version [of WebView] is before 4.4, we generally do not develop the patches ourselves but do notify partners of the issue[...] If patches are provided with the report or put into AOSP we are happy to provide them to partners as well.

WebView 4.4 is where they replaced WebKit with Blink. They are no longer developing WebKit, so it is a reasonable position.

No less reasonable than Apple, at least. I do miss Snow Leopard.

Also, Google not writing their own patch for a 3rd-party library (WebKit) does not negate the 24hr turnaround I've seen on many issues since I've had a Nexus device; something, again, Apple and Microsoft literally never do.

All of that said, I do think Google screwed the pooch by allowing manufacturers to bake their own ROMs; that's why I own a Nexus in the first place. Android's ability to be customized to allow for quick access to apps and information (literally tap from the lock screen, then unlock) far surpasses that of iOS, which is why I prefer Android on the device I carry with me to pull out of my pocket when I want/need to access information quickly; it does lose that advantage on a tablet, which is typically only picked up to perform tasks (rather than the fetch information), which is why I also have an iPad.

In case you got a sophisticated piece of malware which installed a rootkit into your bootloader or system partition, a simple factory reset will *not* help, so your *only safe* remedy is to reflash your phone *completely*. Google for "Reflash Nexus 6" or follow this link: http://forum.xda-developers.co...

After that make sure you install apps *only* from Google Play and you have "Allow Unknown Sources" under Security disabled. Make sure that the apps you install have a considerable number of positive reviews and the apps make use of sane permissions.

Make sure you're the only person who uses your smartphone, because other people may do things you'll regret later. If you absolutely need to let someone use your phone, activate a guest account for them and let them run only the apps they need.

Create a decent password for your lock screen (at least six digits) and make sure your phone locks after a period of inactivity.

If you're extremely paranoid, before installing an app, find its offline version, i.e. apk (they are usually easily googeable) and run it through virustotal.com (I usually do that when I install unpopular dubious apps).

I had the same experience with my 2012 Nexus 7. The biggest improvement was to root and install a kernel with F2FS support and to format the System partition to F2FS with a custom TWRP recovery image.

With a lighter kernel and F2FS support the tablet feels snappy and only lags after a few days of use.

This is the ROM that I used - http://forum.xda-developers.co...

The M7 was released in March 2013. By May 2013, there were youtube videos showing how to root it.

http://www.xda-developers.com/...

"Unless you use HTC tools", what kind of criterion is that? If HTC provides a tool to root the phone, why wouldn't you use it? You _could_ write your own tool that does the same thing as the HTC tool, but why bother? With your M7, like all other devices, local access is in fact full access. (Btw I do this stuff for a living.)

My claim is that if you install Team Viewer, you can expect security vulnerabilities. As it turns out, Team Viewer does indeed cause vulnerabilities, so that's correct.

Sometimes I work with explosives. From time to time, you'll find that an explosive device might go off under certain conditions other than when it's designed to. The "bug report" would look like:

XYZ can explode if heated to 280F rather than the design temperature of 350F.

So the device isn't quite within design spec, but you shouldn't be surprised that an explosive can explode. Team Viewer is made give other people control of your device. Don't be surprised when Team Viewer gives other people control of your device.

I just got my note 3 5 a few days ago. You have to really not be paying attention to make this mistake - especially to the point of breaking the locking mechanism.

That said, you can go into the s-pen setting and turn off the pen detection and it will work just fine.

There is an xda thread on this.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Are you sure you can't install CM12 on your current phone? http://forum.xda-developers.co... at a glance seems to offer everything you need. Your phone's specs are mostly similar to my old Galaxy Note's, ie. 720p display, 1GB RAM and such, and my Note certainly got a lot spiffier with CM12 and seems to consume less battery than it did with stock ROMs.

Me, I want Android to return the ability to selectively turn off stuff that apps can do. If your app keels over because I won't let it access my contacts, I don't want your fucking app.

You can

The built in app ops in previous versions of android were almost deliberately unhelpful anyway. If an app was blocked from accessing something it wanted (but should have been non-essential) it would usually crash, so you were left with a take-it-or-leave-it choice. It was almost as if google wanted to discourage people actually using app ops. A useful privacy manager needs options to send both fake (user configurable) and empty data sets to a hostile app.

Nope. Using this hosts file: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1916098

If you want regular updates get a Google phone or a Cyanogen phone. Otherwise you take a chance, and accept that the manufacturer may lose interest or decide to hold updates back until bugs have been resolved.

Also, the summary is inaccurate, Lollipop is available as an unofficial 3rd party ROM: http://forum.xda-developers.co...

They don't need source, they just use binary blob drivers.

The fact that I would like a bigger screen and that the browser with Android 2.3 Gingerbread is starting to have problems with todays website might actually just get me to do it.

Bigger screens are overrated. As for the rest, just install Android 5.1,

I've seen people reporting that the memleak of Lollipop that was supposed to be fixed in 5.1 already, and in 5.1.1 is still not fixed, and I experience my Nexus 7 being really slow.
I can see this new post on Reddit but also this post on a much more reliable source, xda-developers.

There is no way to avoid being the target of the NSA and CIA if they really want to get your data.

This is too tin-foil-hatish. The thing is, they don't really want your data. They don't care about you, you are just one person who has gotten caught in their wide-ranging net. And further: I don't want to stop them from getting the data of people who they're really going after. If they have a genuine reason to pursue someone, sufficient to pass that tiny speedbump of getting a FISA warrant, then that is what they should do.

What I do want to stop them from doing is sweeping up everyone, including people who they don't really care about, in that wide-ranging net. So the objective is not to absolutely secure my emails and instant messages and phone calls, it's to ensure that getting those personal bits of data is sufficiently difficult that they're not going to do it for no reason. More than that: I am a lot less concerned with the NSA and the CIA doing this, who have some marginal level of oversight, than I am concerned with private companies doing this. The above poster "doesn't want to step out of the mainstream phone ecosystem," but what does that mean exactly?

Let's take it as a given that if you're running a closed-source operating system then you have no control over your own privacy. This rules out iPhones, but you can still use an Android phone with a third-party ROM. That's still mainstream, you can still run standard Android apps with that. Of course, you may have to turn to non-Google sources to get them (I get all my Android games from the Humble bundle, DRM-free). But those apps could be doing who-knows-what, so you'll need to firewall them. Not a problem, we're partway there. How about emails, phone calls, text messages, and location data? Well emails and text messages are essentially the same thing, and securing them means the same thing, the only roadblock comes from the lack of widespread adoption. If we want to noticeably increase our privacy, pushing GPG out there as hard as we can as something which everyone should be using is probably the largest difference that we can make. For you and your privacy, at least, getting your friends to use it should be your goal.

Location data: we've stopped our phone from sending back location data directly, but the phone company can still track us, and they do, by following what cell towers we're connecting to. Can we do something about that? Eh... you can get a SIM card with a pay-as-you-go plan which you register for using a fake name (or no name), paid in cash. This will help a little, but location data can never really be anonymous - how many people live in your house and travel to your workplace and back every day? Probably not too many. The same is mostly true for phone calls, they're not very securable. Encrypted VoIP doesn't work (at least in the US) with the way that data plans are structured, and if you're on a pay-as-you-go program then you don't have a data plan anyway. You could not use your cell service for calls, and only make VoIP calls from wifi hotspots, but this largely nulls the benefits of having a cell phone. I don't know what to say here, if you want to both own a cell phone and use it then regulation is really your only hope for privacy. On the plus side, by cutting out the phone manufacturer and and the various app developers there's only a single point of failure where your privacy is compromised: your phone company. If you can address that problem, somehow, then you've achieved a reasonable, but not bulletproof, level of personal privacy.

Have you stepped out of the mainstream phone ecosystem to do this? Partly. A lot of popular apps which rely on a network connection are off limits in this scenario. Facebook, first and foremost, but you're also excluding yourself from all of the other fad-of-the-moment social networking tchotchkes: Instagram, Yik-Yak, SnapChat, etc. It's not mainstream to care about privacy. I don't know what to say about that. If this is a problem for you, you can either give up or get better friends.

...a slew of new features.

New to Windows, anyway. The headline of TFA declares "Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for phones with interactive notifications, speech-to-text, and Photos app" Yes, seriously. Three features that both Apple and Android have had for how long now? We're supposed to get excited that Microsoft is almost on the verge of kind of catching up?

TFA goes on to say that the new release will present to WP users for the first time such groundbreaking features as "A new option to customize the start screen with a full-size background image", and increasing the number of "quick actions" from a total of four to "up to three rows" .

I do see that they got partition resizing, that's cool. That's something that ought to go into CWM and TWRP. Probably will, eventually. Looks like it's feasible since it's been done for a specific model before, and besides we all know that there are Linux tools for partition resizing. This permits more dirty flashes on OS upgrades. Of course, those are often a Very Bad Idea(tm) so it's not really a priority feature. People with phones with SD cards and root access don't have to care much, since they can back up apps and their big downloaded data is probably already stored on SD card, and won't have to be downloaded again for most apps. (Yes, some developers incompetently fail to detect the existing content, then download it all over again...)

Ya, N7 2012 is completely unusable with Lollipop.

But you can download any F2FS (filesystem) Lollipop ROM and it'll be fine again. For some reason F2FS is amazingly fast, at least on N7 2012.

I settled for a ROM called slimkat or something (see here: http://forum.xda-developers.co... ).

But even otherwise, on newer devices like N5 etc where its quite fast, Lollipop seems to be a mishmash of fisher price colors, too much wasted white space etc. Windows ME is an apt comparison. Though they may have been aiming for iOS 8.

Yeah, 5.0.2 nightlies are indeed up for the Note 4. (here's the T-Mobile/Canadian version. Here's the Sprint version. The "eur" T910F version is also available, with nightlies coming soon.)

Some XDA threads for you: Development and Official nightlies.

Enjoy!

Yeah, 5.0.2 nightlies are indeed up for the Note 4. (here's the T-Mobile/Canadian version. Here's the Sprint version. The "eur" T910F version is also available, with nightlies coming soon.)

Some XDA threads for you: Development and Official nightlies.

Enjoy!

Really. Here's the "simple" 9-phase process with for the pretty common Nexus 5 :
http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Yes, it's pretty cool to go through that for the first phone or two, but after the 5th or 6th time it kinda gets old to have to spend an hour or two keeping track of how TWRP is replacing the clockworkmod bootloader, which exploit to use to root, backing up using Titanium or Helium, etc. After a while it feels less like you're learning new stuff and more like you're jumping through hoops just to get a new OS version that other people get automatically OTA :P But at least the adb and fastboot stuff from Google stays pretty consistent.

Here's an idea. If you are uncomfortable with Google and such, eyeing them as a big brother of some sorts and do not want any Google Play Services or anything Google touching the device... you should return that tablet. Buy a Nexus 9, or a used Nexus 10 or Nexus 7 (2013). This may look counter intuitive, however Nexus devices have pretty much some of the strongest following and modding community behind them and since Google releases the full source for these devices, they are the first to get AOSP variant roms such as CyanogenMod, SlimROM, and Paranoid Android. Once you get them, you can easily follow guides on XDA Developers ( http://www.xda-developers.com/ ) to Unlock the bootloader (Via Google released ADB/Fastboot tools), install a custom recovery (I recommend TWRP which is open source as well so you know what you're getting). Then, depending on your level of paranoid, you can sync the AOSP tree from Google itself and build the entire ROM from scratch yourself, or build or download a flashable zip file of any custom ROM such as CyanogenMod, SlimROM, Paranoid Android etc, and then load it onto the device. AOSP based roms such as these DO NOT have Google's Proprietary API's and Google Play Services. Straight Android. Plus, will full open source, you know what's in it. You will still have to deal with the proprietary blobs left in for display, modem, wifi, etc, however it's as close to full control as you can get for Android with a 100% fully functional Android device.

That's a good question. I don't think many of the tools and ROMs have been analyzed for security by qualified people. As someone else mentioned, http://forum.xda-developers.co... is the most popular source. You'd hope that if there were major issues with the tools used there someone would notice.

You can extract a rooted ROM and compare the contents to the stock ROM.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

I use this on my Note 3. Its pretty awesome
http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Try this for you GS3 http://forum.xda-developers.co...

You mean like these?

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Google doesn't care if end users download and install them, they just don't want OEMs to do it without properly joining the OHA.

Though in all honesty, I'd just leave Windows intact and install bluestax (which is free.) Getting drivers and shit working on that is going to be a royal PITA and probably won't be worth the time you spend on it. Just install something like Start8 and ignore that piece of shit called metro -- it won't bother you if you don't bother it.

The A5 is a bigger phone so its not really a replacement for the Alpha.

If you want an Alpha sized phone without touchwiz, wait a month or two and see how the CyanogenMod 11 port is going.

In other words, buy a piece of hardware/software combo, and throw away the software, and warranty, and spend a bunch of time and effort screwing with it to try to make it work?

Why not just buy a Nexus or another phone?

Umm, cause the only other Alpha sized phone is the iPhone 6? Which if you are into the android ecosystem then you probably won't want to move to.

The A5 is a bigger phone so its not really a replacement for the Alpha.

If you want an Alpha sized phone without touchwiz, wait a month or two and see how the CyanogenMod 11 port is going.

In other words, buy a piece of hardware/software combo, and throw away the software, and warranty, and spend a bunch of time and effort screwing with it to try to make it work?

Why not just buy a Nexus or another phone?

The Alpha only recently became available in the US, and it certainly had my eye, being not phablet sized but still a "flagship" class phone and very well built. I'd have been happy to pay the price, but I passed, for one simple reason:

TouchWiz.

No thanks Samsung. Not having it. Your TouchWiz crapped up A5 can sod off as well.

The A5 is a bigger phone so its not really a replacement for the Alpha.

If you want an Alpha sized phone without touchwiz, wait a month or two and see how the CyanogenMod 11 port is going.

As others have pointed out, XPrivacy does exactly that. Unfortunately, it runs on top of the Xposed Framework, which was coded assuming Dalvik. ART breaks it, and Lollipop has switched over entirely to ART. According to the developer it's going to be a monumental task rewriting it to work under ART, and not to expect anything until 2015.

I've fallen back to my old standby - Droidwall. It's an iptables firewall. Doesn't help with the apps which need Internet access to function, but works on everything else. They can collect all the information they want. It's useless to them if the app can't phone home.

As others have pointed out, XPrivacy does exactly that. Unfortunately, it runs on top of the Xposed Framework, which was coded assuming Dalvik. ART breaks it, and Lollipop has switched over entirely to ART. According to the developer it's going to be a monumental task rewriting it to work under ART, and not to expect anything until 2015.

I've fallen back to my old standby - Droidwall. It's an iptables firewall. Doesn't help with the apps which need Internet access to function, but works on everything else. They can collect all the information they want. It's useless to them if the app can't phone home.

LuneOS. It could use a few more developers to bring it out of alpha state

http://www.xda-developers.com/...

XDA Developers

You're welcome.

XDA Forums

The phone has a 550MHz processor and 256MB of RAM...the performance will probably be abysmal in today's world of multicore CPUs but you asked for a ROM and here is a jellybean ROM...

should I have to throw away a $300 paid for phone that still works, electrically (at least)?

Well, there *is* an unofficial CM11 port. It sounds like the limited memory and storage was a bit of a deal-breaker for everyone trying to support the Nexus One (even the alternate ROMs) until KitKat came along with its reduced resource needs. I suspect installing the Google Play Services stuff to get the app scanning might be asking a bit much.

But yeah, generally speaking I don't disagree with your premise. The Nexus series, of all devices, would be something I'd expect Google to go above and beyond to keep working. I can sorta understand OEM's dropping their flagships pretty much as soon as the conveyors on the production lines stop spinning (and fuck-you-very-much HTC), but I'd hope that platform champion number one could do a little better than that.

The headline also fails to mention that only manually configured networks are affected

Scans originating from wpa_supplicant running on the host only show scan_ssid=1 (manually configured) networks. The PNO scans affect all SSIDs. See posts #24-25:

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Got this from a previous discussion on /.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

The purpose of the Nexus line of devices is twofold:

1) You get the stock Android experience, not some third-party vendor bastardisation with bundled crapware
2) You can root and flash them in moments, there is no locking in place to prevent it

Making use of 2) above will allow you to run Android 4.4.3 on your Nexus One

Yes, it's sucky that Google abandon their devices like all other hardware manufacturers, but Google isn't a hardware company. Google produce Android so they can use it as an advertising and user profiling platform. The hardware is just a delivery mechanism.

Take a look at Xprivacy. If you have a rooted android phone you can do that and more today. I think Cyanogenmod also has some sort of permission control built in now. Even Iphone's have basic permissions. The only thing that doesn't is stock Android and Windows.

Google knows there's a market for it, but they're worried about ad revenue or apps breaking because it would be "too much of a burden" on developers to make sure there apps behave when permissions are denied.

It won't be long before IMSI catchers are easily detectable. Even though I have nothing to hide, I can't wait for that day.

https://opensource.srlabs.de/p...

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

https://github.com/jtwarren/sp...

I've used this kernel with slimrom.net.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

Currently using this ROM which comes with the previously mentioned kernel, either way works great.

http://forum.xda-developers.co...

If you get trickster from the playstore you can change all kinds of settings with the custom kernel, but the stock settings work great.