I have a ZTE N817 that only care to use as an music player. It is horrifically slow and unresponsive with it’s 0.5 GB of RAM and 2GB of storage. I’m hoping somebody more knowlegdeable can help me get it set up to not be garbage. I could use my PC to put music on an SD card, then I’d just need bluetooth and headphone output, and a basic almost text mode only interface for browsing music files.
Here are a few articles to read. The TL;DR is that you can disable most system apps you don’t need without root.
See if there are any stock ROMs or even better bare AOSP ROMs for it and that will get you off to a good start and then you can further strip out any unnecessary bits and customise back up from there.
Unfortunately, it seems like your device isn’t supported by any proper custom ROMs. But you can still root it. I’d recommend something like dirtyCOW-based root, instead of the proprietary root tools like KingRoot.
You can then uninstall unneeded system apps, and edit the build.prop
file, android’s system configuration file.
You can change a lot there, but most interesting to you might be these properties.
(e.g. append config.disable_telephony=true
, config.disable_location=true
, config.disable_network=true
to build.prop).
You can also usually disable animations in the Developer options, among other useful things like keeping the device awake when plugged in.
You can do a lot more if you really want to, for example you could try to stop the entire android UI stack(SurfaceFlinger et al), and run a custom framebuffer-based UI with applications compiled for the Bionic LibC. Audio should also probably work via ALSA, but bluetooth might be more difficult, as android drivers often require some android system servers to be running. In the end, your phone is just an embedded device running Linux, and you can get root on it. Depending on how far you want to go, you could port something like postmarketOS for this device.
But all of that is a little more involved…
I was able to connect the phone, but commands/syntax must be different. Only successful command was “reboot”. Looks like those tools would work for a Samsung j3 orbit I have as well, except I got “signature verification failed” when trying to sideload apps or ROMs. Didn’t help that I couldn’t right click to open CMD in a folder, had to figure out to type cd < file path > to get where I wanted.