A developer's rant about Android.md

I code for a living - for two decades, now. And UNIX is in my blood.

I have therefore (naturally) installed Termux on my Android phone, and use it to spawn sshd - a very useful process when your ISP connection fails you, since you get to use the phone's internet connection (via ssh -D 1080 ... and configuring Firefox to use localhost:1080 as SOCKS proxy). This does not depend on your contract allowing hotspot-ing or not - it's close to bullet-proof.

Yesterday I ssh-ed in the phone, looking around and checking out the Android environment - and I see Termux's ps aux return among others .... /system/xbin/dropboxd.

What the heck - I never installed Dropbox on my phone!

It does not appear in the list of installed apps, either - and is naturally not removable, since I am not root.

(sigh) Android is great, but there's three things I hate about it:

• every manufacturer installs their own un-installable crap (you can't remove them, since you are not root), which eat up resources and drain the battery, and do God knows what with your data / keystrokes / etc. We live in a post-Snowden era - these things are no longer conspiracy theories.
• the manufacturer has no incentive to pay engineers for creating firmware upgrades. Any Android phone is guaranteed to be left behind, version-wise - unless you use flagships like Nexus.
• to become root and really own my device, I have to trust Chinese hackers-produced malware.

The dropboxd thing was the last straw... I had no prior experience with the process, but succeeded in using ADB and TWRP to unlock my phone's bootloader - and then easily installed CyanogenMod 12.1.

My phone...

• is now at Android 5.1.1. CyanogenMod follows Android, so I am now sure I will have updates - forever.
• the phone's software is open-source - I can (and will) compile it myself. No friggin "mystery" dropboxd process instances
• I have an easy developer option now, to become root whenever I want... And I used my root access to install a debootstrapped Debian in chroot (under /data/debian)... so now my phone is apt-get enabled - the sky is the limit :-)

Naturally, the first thing I did: apt-get install openssh-server python :-)

Conclusion - the end result is, I dare say, excellent... and I have already begun to see improvements in battery usage (since the manufacturer "stuff" are not running).

Fellow devs - fight your manufacturer, install CM.

I'd be interested to know which specific manufacturer you encountered this on.

Also, two years later... Any new insights?

@Potherca: Motorola.

As for the "any news" part - nothing has changed. The argument still holds - and will apparently forever hold; the newest versions of Android have locked things down even more - and my (new) Moto G6 Play isn't yet supported by LineageOS...

Maybe the Purism phone will change things - but it looks like we will only be able to choose "expensive and open" or "cheap and shut-tight" phones.