I'm the ashamed owner of a $40 smart phone, the LG Spree for Cricket.

TODO phone selfie

It's way more powerful than my laptop--more ram, more CPU, better wireless connectivity...

TODO stats

But, the poor little device has been brainwashed.  It doesn't answer to me.  (And it never will, not in its [heart-of-hearts](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12-final24.pdf)...)

But, I can at least get it to stop running casual games in the background, even after a fresh reboot!  There's a setting for that.  I might be able to change that setting just by rooting the device, but why not fully replace the OS?

[Cyanogenmod](https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/About) is an alternative Android distribution.  Although early versions were crudely[1] modified ROM images of official firmwares, the Cyanogenmod community has grown to the point where they track [AOSP](https://source.android.com/) and port each new release to LOTs of devices themselves!

http://opengapps.org/#aboutsection

1: Crude just means quick-n-dirty.  Props to those trailblazers!  I miss the days of random suid editable scripts laying around on the filesystem... :)