Episode: 2359
Title: HPR2359: Android ROM and PAIN
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2359/hpr2359.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:41:20

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This is HPR Episode 2359, titled Android R&M and Pain.
It is hosted by Opera Nero R and in about 25 minutes long and carry an explicit flag.
The summary is, I go over some of my pain and run for Android over the years.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Hello everyone, this is Operator Rappercurdy with another episode of Hacker Club of the Radio for you.
This one is going to be about Android and modding and installing ROMs over the course of my years with Android.
I started out with a G1, one of the G1s and I followed that out to still running Android today.
A little bit has changed. It's kind of noisier than it first start out.
So you had the G1 and it was pretty straightforward and everybody knew which phone was what and everybody had the same build and it was pretty easy to track.
What's happened here recently is that there's so many different ROMs, so many different versions of the same phone, so many different versions of Android.
Things start getting to your cloudy and you don't know which drivers to use, which firmware to use, which build to use, which radio drivers to use, which ROM to use, which goes with what patches can you install with what zips and all this stuff.
So it's gotten fairly confusing. What I found the easiest thing to do today is to go by date.
So in my example here I have a, let's see if I can find my post, but I have a Sony Compact, a Z5C, is what they call it.
Now what the problem with these is that there's a bunch of different kinds.
There's like a UK version. There's a other kind of version.
What I have is a 5803, I'm pretty sure, and I'm running 5823 Android or 5823 firmware that I flashed using regular standard recovery.
That's an Australia firmware. So the firmware that came with it was actually kind of buggy.
And supposedly the fingerprint scanner didn't actually work, but I didn't use it now anyways because of the ridiculous case that I have on my phone.
So this episode was basically to help people get the right thing for the right phone and get the right version upgraded to the right device.
Generally speaking, if you get a standard like, you know, Samsung Galaxy, it's going to be pretty straightforward.
You would just try to find the latest ROM for that that tickled your fancy and use that method.
But in general, you kind of have to know where you are to get to where you want to be or at least have root access.
So for my phone, there was no way to what I understand jailbreak without doing the standard method of requesting the unlock key from Sony and going through that method.
So that was the first time I had experienced that where you had to send them your number and then they sent you back a key to unlock the bootloader and then you could flash whatever firmware you wanted and then continue from there.
So that was the first time I had experienced that process with this experience Z5 Compact.
I had installed this probably, you'll see when this post was generally created.
I edited it back in the day. I don't know when it was originally created.
This had to have been way sometime way before, probably in the past three months.
I've been running this built for about a year, two years.
I had installed different versions, like three or four different ROMs. They all crashed and were buggy.
It's probably because I'm not sure exactly which phone I even have.
When I bought it through Amazon, it said it was a 5803, but it might have been or might be some other phone entirely.
I haven't actually looked at the hardware on the back of it. I'm pretty sure it's a 5803, but anyways, there's a lot of confusion as to what your phone is.
I'm sure there's easier ways to figure that out. Take the case apart, take the back off, look at the battery and look under there and look up that number.
But you have to pretty much know what phone you have at least first.
Once you know what kind of phone you have, maybe there's features on one that aren't on the other and they're still the name the same.
For example, you might have a UK one and the US one. They both have the same number, but you actually have to know.
In some cases, you have to know which one is which because of they change maybe a driver or maybe they change a piece of radio or whatever.
So you kind of have to know the bits and pieces that go together with that, but your safest bet is open up the battery case, figure out what kind of model phone you have.
And then figure out what the latest and greatest ROM or build for yours is.
So I'm actually running like 7.1 and now 7.1.1 is out and they have an Australian flash for that one.
And they also have updates for that one that will allow you to remove the bloat and give you root and all the recovery stuff.
So I've been running for about a year this 7.1 and I've been nagged by the Sony update thing over and over and over again.
I originally for whatever reason couldn't figure out or didn't feel like figuring out how to remove that Sony stuff.
In hindsight, I guess I couldn't get the, I think I thought maybe I broke the recovery boot.
So I wasn't able to boot into the recovery, so I figured that I had messed that part of it up or something.
I don't know. So for whatever reason for the longest time, about a year almost, I thought that I couldn't even get into the recovery mode to the team win recovery mode for the longest time up until yesterday actually.
So I was really yesterday or today ready to actually install this latest 7.1.1 and I went to do the whole down and try to get it into that flash mode and I actually ended up in the recovery mode of which I could gain control of the vice and mount the system partition and all that stuff and then remove those system apps.
They actually have a four slash system which where your system applications are stored under the app folder.
And then there's a priv dash app or app dash priv or something that has like privileged applications, I guess, in it.
So that's new to me where they have two different folders. There's a four slash system app folder and a four slash system app.
App dash priv folder that has a BK's in it stuff. I essentially ended up removing anything I wouldn't do with update center.
Anything I'm going to do with in the app folder, having to do with Sony and in the priv dash app folder, trying to have any to do with the name Sony.
And I rebooted and that seems to have fixed my problem for now at least with those system applications that I don't want or have control to remove.
Where you would start generally is the XDA dash developers form and they put in what you phone you have and you kind of navigate those waters.
Again, the easiest way to do that is figure out what phone you have, make sure it's the right phone, figure out what build you have and figure out what version of Android you have.
And that'll kind of guide you in the right direction. In most cases, the worst case scenario is that you flash a firmware that doesn't actually do anything and it just crashes.
Then you have to actually boot into recovery and flash another firmware. I think possibly if you install completely the wrong firmware, it won't even boot and you could potentially break it.
I'm not familiar with what ends up happening when you, I think firmware contains everything that has the boot stuff and all that.
So I think if you ruin that, you might even end up stomping on the recovery portion of it. I'm not quite familiar with when things go bad.
It's only I've only break one G1 back in the day with the danger mod, which in that name would give you the indication that you should probably pay attention to when you're performing those steps.
But I like to do so.
Anyways, you want to figure out what phone you have, you want to figure out what build you have, you want to figure out what Android version you have.
And you also want to kind of figure out, usually I try to lean more towards the lightest version of something.
So, say, engine mod, I try to stay away from, I try to find lighter, the lightest ones I can possibly find.
And then from there, if I want to add more APKs, I'll actually pull them out of other things.
The benefits you'll get out of heavier mods is, you'll get more features and more desktop-y things and stupid stuff that really nobody cares about.
For me, it's about battery life and optimization and removing any applications that I don't need and having the slim down version.
I actually had a ROM on there that was called like slim ROM or something like that.
But try to hunt down for the smallest one that you think has got the most traction.
And also that's the newest build.
So, for example, I'm running 3.3A.0.372 and there's several versions after that.
They actually end up going to like 3.3A or 2.3A or whatever.
Anyways, I came and say how many different points and letters are in these build versions for this for my phone.
But the idea there is that, you know, every so often they release a new firmware for that.
And people will get the original firmware and then they'll start hacking it up to do whatever it is they need to do.
And piecing together their own ROMs for it and making the phone crash and all that stuff.
So with this particular phone, when it came out, I would say six months later, then people started having a fair number of ROMs for them.
Of which none of them worked for me.
And I kept having to flash it and I ended up flashing different versions.
I did like Pac-Man and all this stuff.
I may have spoken about Android stuff before.
And I'll have to go over my notes.
Yeah, so it looks like the podcasts I've done for Android are about more application-based.
So I'll kind of go over the core stuff you would have see in a standard build.
You have your recovery, which there's like 20 different kinds of recoveries out there.
The traditional one is like Team Win.
That allows you to boot into like a recovery mode where you can do a terminal and you can mount your disks and like format stuff and clean.
And you can do basically like kind of a bunch of utilities in there.
You can load zip files.
You can install updates.
You can install zips.
You can move things around file system.
You can have like a graphical file explorer as well.
I removed the apps I didn't want.
What else is useful in there?
There's stuff to fix permissions in some cases and delete your cache.
When you have some kind of issue with this particular application.
So there's a lot of utilities in there to kind of help you enhance your current build.
Usually this is where you'll install super user and the super user binary.
So you can do root get have root to your phone while you're actually running it.
Kind of the second thing in that stage or before that is kind of like your radio drivers which sometimes is inside of firmware.
I'm not quite sure how it works.
But in some cases you'll get radio drivers which will make your wireless better worse or broken entirely.
So sometimes you'll see radio drivers but I don't quite see those as much anymore.
I think those don't get messed with as much.
But I have seen radio updates on some of the phones I've had three or four different kinds of Android phones.
So there's that piece of it.
There's the kind of the boot piece which I don't know if that's before recovery.
I probably should be doing a better way or a better description of how this works.
But there's a lot of times you'll get a boot image and that is for the booting.
And then there's recovery which is usually standard.
The team win recovery.
Excuse me. And in some cases you'll have like the kernel which might include the boot.
That would you would see that if there was some kind of enhancements for example.
Usually when you do kernel stuff you're trying to overclock or give the ability to overclock or maybe you're trying to remove
or add some kind of core feature within the phone to get it to do something to support something.
For example I had issues with sound on one and I had to flash a to have to control the sound.
I had to flash a custom like kernel so that I could do fancy stuff with my audio.
So you'll see that generally most people won't have to mess around too much with that.
So you'll get like a firmware file or you'll have to usually sometimes you'll have to actually downgrade your phone
to get root access to it.
So for example if you're running like 6.0 Android you'll have to like downgrade your phone to an older version using a flash file
and then root that to get ultimate root access to your phone and then install a bootloader and then install whatever.
Once you have the recovery boot in there the recovery flashed to the to the phone.
You can install pretty much whatever you want in after that but to get to the recovery part is you need root to generally do that
or you need a firmware image that actually has a recovery boot stuff in it.
I think the disparity between all the steps involved in getting what you want as an in-product has come down.
There's not a whole lot of confusion as to like what to do once you know you're in the right place.
So it'll be like do this, do that, do this.
But the hard but in lieu of being super complicated for one phone.
So it used to be you had a handful of different types of phone and it was really complicated to figure out like which what steps to do and what order
and maybe they would someone would put a step in over here and put a step in over there but it's pretty streamlined and they're pretty good about that
where it's gone the other direction is there are so many different phones and so many different versions and so many different people posting ROMs
that it's like a sea of just mess mess where people are posting ROMs that aren't quite there yet and maybe you accidentally download that ROM
and load it in and you realize that your camera doesn't work well that's part of the ROM is that the camera doesn't work.
So there's a lot of noise I don't want to say noise because you know where the lazy people and we're just running the mods
and we're not actually running the ROMs and we're not actually contributing but there's a fair amount of noise around which thing to get
and which thing to install but I think once you figure out what the right thing to install is the steps are generally pretty easy
and then some people will even ask the question saying you know hey I'm on 7.1 I'm not on 6 so how do I get rude
right and they'll say okay we'll flash back to the 6.0 and then go from there so I think once you know what you want the steps aren't that hard to follow
what I will say is I have had a lot of issues around ADB which is the Android debugging executable at least within Windows
so you have to install ADB to do anything particularly originally flash the thing
so you have to the drivers not only have the drivers for the...
Jesus what do you want to do?
Not only do you have to have the drivers for the phone you have to have the ADB executable with all the DLOs and stuff to actually perform the USB debugging
so you have to enable USB debugging you have to do that through the about options inside of the Android and unlock that feature
so you can actually enable it to bug mode to actually do anything to the phone
so with that said that's a pain point for me there's a thing called USB W
USB D-E-V-I-E-W is by the folks that used to be system turtles
USB D-E-V-I-E-W
I think it's a system turtles thing it might be a different character now
a nurse off I think it's actually a nurse off nurse off that net or formally nurse off that net
had it it's a USB utility that allows you to look at all your devices
so well what I've actually had to do it's okay excuse me
in some cases I've actually had to go in there and completely remove anything having to do with USB
keyboards mouse scanners printers all the other Android devices
because I'll plug multiple Android devices into my computer and sometimes it won't work
and it won't connect and the drivers will be there whatever what I found
the easiest way to remedy this for me at least is to wipe all the drivers off for USB
plug the phone in fresh hit refresh and see what pops up and then start installing drivers and
satisfying things there I've actually recently had a path issue somehow
so I had the ADB executable sitting somewhere in a path that didn't have the latest and greatest DLLs with it
so the I actually removed the ADB executable out of the system 32 folder
and the sys wild folder for Windows 32 that or 64 bit
and that seemed to fix so wherever it got the ADB executable from
I don't know but you can get screwed up by putting ADB in the wrong place or installing it in the wrong place
it's basically a service that gets spun up and then you connect to your phone through USB
and you can actually find it to you know like a TCP address and you can do stuff
through there and you actually you can set proxies up through it and all kinds of crazy stuff
but anyways that's always been a pain point for me and using USB W and wiping out everything in there
and then trying it again sometimes in some cases I've had to restart the computer
and restart the phone to get them to sync back up because though I think it's generally Windows
it gets upset after you unplug it and plug it back in and maybe it gets confused
and I'll have to reset in some cases the computer to get that to be hooked up
but I think once you get the USB debug kind of showing up everything is kind of downhill from there
because these flash tools all essentially are requiring you to actually have the driver install for the phone
and to be able to talk to the ADB interface in some cases
so that's that I think that's a big pain point and there's always been a pain point for me
every time I feel like every time I have to plug my phone in and I do ADB devices
nothing ever shows up because I didn't enable it on the phone
and you have to actually click through the phone and say allow this device to connect to you
through the DB bug mode that's a prevent someone plugging in the device to a foreign object
and it doing stuff while it's locked while that's great
sometimes I'll spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why it's not working
and then realized that I should have clicked the dialog box on the actual phone
to allow that USB debug mode to be, you know, allowed
so well that's it, it's all about control, right?
with the Apple you have that simplicity simplicity and everything just works
and there's no confusion about how to use your device
but you're locked into them unless you root it and jailbreak it
and even then you still have to do some stuff
you have to be on the Apple bus for some things
but with Android you have a lot of flexibility
you can do things like C8 rooting and you can change mount different distros
and you can actually run just straight up Debian if you want to on a phone
and they have portable versions of other operating systems
you can load up through binding image files via C8 root
and you can like remote into your phone through a PLC
and like perform just have it work like a normal computer
that's usually not really going to give you a whole lot of value
because it's going to be super slow
but you know nowadays the best part about having root
is that you can actually backup all your stuff
and all your applications and all your data
so I use my old school guy
I use titanium backup
and titanium backup was one of the first ones that kind of led the way
within backing up your devices and all that stuff
so I've been using that forever
it allows you to backup the applications
it allows you to backup the data for the applications
it allows you to create a bundled single file zip
that you can send to other people and they can unload it
and they'll have all the same settings as your device
it allows you to look into different things
like the database structure
and then you can go further down to it and look into
you actually use a database app to connect to the SQLite file
and open it up and start mangling with it
you can do things like if you can freeze applications
and manage system applications
you can move system applications out of the system folder
and move them into user land
you can do all kinds of great things to break your phone
and enhance it
what I will recommend is you want to go in there
and back up the application before you mess with it
so that way if it starts crashing or you have issues
you can restore it back
if you have to through the back end and pull that APK back in
which doesn't really have it a whole lot
but when I've done cleaning house before I've removed applications
that somehow interfaced with something and caused like a crash loop
with something like the desktop or the launcher
in this case
so that's what I'll say about that
I've kind of been going droning on about this year
like 20 minutes here
if you're wary about Android and wary about ROMs
and you want control of your device
it's not that hard
you can probably just get a standard phone that everybody else has
like a Samsung S5 or an S4
even you can get your feet wet in that space
so if you get a fairly popular phone
which most of the fairly popular ones are shit
you'll be good there
but I've got the compact Sony compact
because it's a smaller phone
and you know you maybe you can find a deal on other phones
but the more obscure phone you get
the less kind of support you're going to get
so keep that in mind
if you want to easy
with Android the first time around
get your like Samsung Galaxy S5
and you'll have tons of mods
and tons of people and tons of focus on it
and you'll be able to install signage and mod
pretty easy
and you won't have to go through all the craziness
that I have to do
installing an Australian firmware to my phone
to get this stupid thing to even take a picture
so anyways I hope this doesn't discourage anyone
really at the end of the day
I kind of go overkill
and I slim my system up a little bit
and poke with it too much
so I've done that less and less
as I get more Android devices
I just put the firmware on there
and I get rid of the stuff that bothers me
and I don't go in there hunting for things
to remove that may affect the system
so there's also other things like
I'll mention X-Mod
or X
I think it's called X-Mod
anyways
it's essentially an injector for
you can kind of
real-time patch something
exposed, the exposed module
so it's
I think it's X-P-O-S-E-D exposed
they don't have it for 7.0
because they move from Delvic to
whatever the new one is
so
they call art or something
anyways
I shouldn't know all this
but
I don't know if they're going to
even fix it for that
for newer versions
because it's
basically really complicated
and requires a whole new rewrite
they might find an alternative method
to do this real-time injector
so essentially
I can for example
good enterprises
has an exposed module
that will bypass the root checking
so you can have root on your phone
and still have good enterprises installed
so there's
there's a
value to be had there
you can do
kind of
real-time hacks
to APKs
and not actually
modify the APK itself
so that's kind of
what it helps out with
anyways
hope this helps somebody out
I'm going to
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