Hello. I work for a nonprofit (a tiny Sprint MNVO) who received a block donation several years ago of 1,000 nexus 5(s) and we give them to various participating agencies who in turn distribute them to low-income and/or homeless individuals who meet certain criteria.
The task has fallen on me to update these phones, install bundled software, and perform various other relatively trivial customizations such as boot animations and wallpaper. In some cases the customizations include bundled contact lists, which is particularly problematic for my current methodology.
I have been doing the above by setting up a template phone and then backing up to fastboot-flashable system and userdata partitions using Chainfire's excellent Flashfire tool, however this method poses certain general pains in my ass, including:
1. The resultant phone remains rooted and having flashfire installed, which is not desired for the end user so this must be undone. This is not a huge deal, I can uninstall using ADB, and have incorporated those lines into my flash script.
2. Since we do no wish to include a preinstalled user account, the contacts when included are very fragile and have a tendency to get wiped out and require manual importing from .vcf. Since the contacts vary per ~ 8 licalizations, this is tricky and has the potential for mistakes, which are unacceptable.
3. The phone does not start in a fresh state, that is userdata is populated so that the setup wizard is not invoked, which seriously bothers the purist in me.
4. There seems to be a potential for weird play services bugs to be introduced with OTAs and sometimes the OTAs end with an error but then appear to be installed anyway. Obviously this is a signature difference resulting from system partition customizations.
In general, I feel like there is a "right" way to go about this, and that this is not it. Should I be compiling from scratch? I'm not a dev strictly speaking (was a tester by trade) but I'm not entirely stupid, if there were kind of a walkthru. I've read the one on XDA/android and it made me overwhelmed and sleepy. Maybe someone knows of some others. Particularly, how do other vendors install software and perform customizations post-init, yet remain OTA friendly. Something to do with system/vendor? How does that work? Failing all else, is there an easy way to disable OTAs altogether on a stock ROM?
Help..!?
Thanks in advance for your attention.
Paul Koen
The task has fallen on me to update these phones, install bundled software, and perform various other relatively trivial customizations such as boot animations and wallpaper. In some cases the customizations include bundled contact lists, which is particularly problematic for my current methodology.
I have been doing the above by setting up a template phone and then backing up to fastboot-flashable system and userdata partitions using Chainfire's excellent Flashfire tool, however this method poses certain general pains in my ass, including:
1. The resultant phone remains rooted and having flashfire installed, which is not desired for the end user so this must be undone. This is not a huge deal, I can uninstall using ADB, and have incorporated those lines into my flash script.
2. Since we do no wish to include a preinstalled user account, the contacts when included are very fragile and have a tendency to get wiped out and require manual importing from .vcf. Since the contacts vary per ~ 8 licalizations, this is tricky and has the potential for mistakes, which are unacceptable.
3. The phone does not start in a fresh state, that is userdata is populated so that the setup wizard is not invoked, which seriously bothers the purist in me.
4. There seems to be a potential for weird play services bugs to be introduced with OTAs and sometimes the OTAs end with an error but then appear to be installed anyway. Obviously this is a signature difference resulting from system partition customizations.
In general, I feel like there is a "right" way to go about this, and that this is not it. Should I be compiling from scratch? I'm not a dev strictly speaking (was a tester by trade) but I'm not entirely stupid, if there were kind of a walkthru. I've read the one on XDA/android and it made me overwhelmed and sleepy. Maybe someone knows of some others. Particularly, how do other vendors install software and perform customizations post-init, yet remain OTA friendly. Something to do with system/vendor? How does that work? Failing all else, is there an easy way to disable OTAs altogether on a stock ROM?
Help..!?
Thanks in advance for your attention.
Paul Koen
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