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! TODO talk about http://opengapps.org/#aboutsection TODO use proper ikiwiki footnotes with return link 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... :)