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Old 04-21-2017, 04:15 PM   #30743
Cole
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MuseChaser View Post
You guys (Andrew and Cole) sound like you could maybe give me a few pointers. I'm not a very big fan of being FORCED into the cloud and handing over all my activities, contacts, and location to Google. I'm mostly a PC guy (cut my teeth on the Commodore 64, and have been "building" desktops since the old 8088/8086 years), using primarily Win7 w/ open source software, but I've got one Linux box I'm dabbling with and a bunch of Raspberry Pi media and audio boxes based on LibreElec/Kodi and Arch/Runeaudio. Recently I bought my wife a new Asus tablet and I figured I'd tinker around with her old Toshiba AT100 Thrive (dual core @800, 1 gig ram, Android 4.0.4). I managed to root it, flash a ROM, gain superuser access, blah blah, and even remove a couple previously untouchable pieces of bloatware. Using mostly apps from F-droid now, but I'm sure there's still a TON of Google-related stuff on there.

My goals? To know the tablet as well as I know my PC. To have it only use local information unless I specifically ask it to do otherwise. To be as google-free as possible.

Any pointers?

Thanks!
Head to XDA developers for your device and read up on EVERYTHING you possibly can.

Back before the iPhone, I had a string of different Android devices. My favourite was the Nexus 5. It came super mega stock with almost zero bloatware on it. Still flashed a different ROM on it almost every week, the choices were insane back then. My advice, try to find a developer who speaks english well, has a history of updating that's fairly frequent. Or delve into doing your own ROMs so you know exactly what goes into them.
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