$20 Android Dev Phone

I’ve been doing a bit of Android dev work lately, just tinkering mostly, and I needed hardware to test on.

Following the advice of local Android guru Mark, I just went to Amazon and bought something cheap running at least 4.0. What I ended up with was a Verizon prepaid LG Optimus Exceed 2

The hardware is decent, especially for a $20 phone. I’ve not used it a ton yet, but I would say this would almost be a tolerable daily use phone. Camera sucks, but who cares.

Here’s how I got it set up.

Skip Activation

Right after boot, you can skip activation with this sequence:

1. Volume Up
2. Volume Down
3. Back Button
4. Home Button

Source: XDA

Developer Mode

Go to Settings > General > About Phone > Software Information then tap Build Number seven times.

You should find a Developer Options in your main settings now.

There’s one more step though on OS X. When connecting to USB, you only trigger debug mode by choosing Internet Connection > Ethernet for the USB connection method.

Source: Stack Overflow

Root It

The internet would have you believe that rooting your Optimus Exceed 2 is super easy. For me, it was not. There is a one-click guide but I had to fall back on the original set of scripts to make it work, which took a couple tries.

But it worked!

Conclusion

I’ve not actually used it for a lot of development yet, but I’ve loaded up some apps with the Play store and it’s reasonably responsive. I like it.

Fixing Broken Droid2 Root

I had previously rooted my Droid2, but it was broken when the OTA Gingerbread came down. I don’t really use root for much now that I don’t really develop for Android anymore, but I found a need today, so I decided to re-root.

I found a nicely packaged exploit on rootzwiki, but when I ran it I hit a snag.

* daemon started successfully *
* Running exploit [part 3 of 3]...
remount succeeded
5524 KB/s (1867568 bytes in 0.330s)
651 KB/s (26264 bytes in 0.039s)
5928 KB/s (196521 bytes in 0.032s)
	pkg: /data/local/tmp/Superuser.apk
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_ALREADY_EXISTS]
link failed File exists

My old root was blocking my new root. Lame.

Easy to fix after poking around on the file system.

Essentially it boils down to this:

1. Manually remove old Superuser.apk
2. Clean up Superuser.apk data files
3. Install new super user apk
4. Link up new su

Details below, but as always YMMV.

Manually remove old Superuser.apk

Make sure you know the full namespace before you delete this file, you will need it later (i.e. com.noshufou.android.su)

[email protected]:~/root$ ./adb.linux shell
# cd /system/app
# rm Superuser.apk

Clean up Superuser.apk data files

[email protected]:~/root$ ./adb.linux uninstall com.noshufou.android.su
Success

Install new super user apk

From here on out you are essentially just finishing up the root script that got skipped.

[email protected]:~/root$ ./adb.linux install Superuser.apk 
3217 KB/s (196521 bytes in 0.059s)
	pkg: /data/local/tmp/Superuser.apk
Success

Link up new su

[email protected]:~/root$ ./adb.linux shell
# cd /system/bin
# mv su su.orig
# ln -s /system/xbin/su /system/bin/su

All done! You should be rooted again.