If you were following my other post this week, you’ll see that I’ve had to take a short trip away from ubuntu phone while a few kinks are ironed out. I had started down this journey thinking that I would just install Cyanogenmod and then download a few apps from google play and then kill the connection to the mothership.
Turns out it isn’t quite that easy. It’s rare that you will find a search online that doesn’t bring up good results but if you search the keywords in my post here you’ll find there is a dearth 🙁
Note a friend of mine pointed out that by being on the ‘non google android’ you are taking a second risk which is to be ‘less controlled’ which means slightly more vulnerable. Fair enough, but I’m going to take my risk because I want just Telegram installed. Let’s see if this works:
- download the ‘gapps’ thing from here: http://www.teamandroid.com/gapps/
- Navigate in terminal using cd command to where the downloaded gapps thing is.
- Side load it as is onto the device sd card in the same way you may have done it with my previous tutorial. My command in the terminal looked like this: adb push filename.zip /sdcard/ when it is complete you’ll see how much moved and how long it took (in terminal)
- boot into recovery mode. I assume you know how to do this if you have Cyanogen (it’s the volume power button combo)
- choose ‘install’ button
- choose the gapps thing
- slide the blue arrow thing to confirm rocking and rolling
- rock and roll
Your device should reboot and have a whole bunch of nasty google spyware installed that will make sure you are forever in chains.
Anyway, the play store is now there so go in, get what you need and then follow these steps to disconnect from the mothership.
- go to google play store.
- download the apps you need to survive and nothing more (play store may crash from time to time as it’s not supported)
- do nothing more because…
… It turns out that I have yet more learning. The real learning here is that I should have invested my time in bug-filing for ubuntu phone and we’d all be further ahead 🙁 But anyway, I learned that you can’t really ‘go in and go out’ with gapps. It kind of flashes itself on the phone so to get rid of it is to wipe your phone (it seems).
I think what I”m really looking for here is a cyanogen mod install with *just* telegram and a few others I want… for now I’m just going to leave it semi-vulnerable and plan another ubuntu exodus.
Hey I’m in the same situation actually. I came from Ubuntu Touch and moved to cyanogenmod.
First thing going you have to know about gapps, you have to install it right after cyanogenmod. Without any boot between.
You will avoid all the error you get.
But I didn’t choose that path. Most of the app you’ll need will be on f-droid repo. You will be able to install Telegram (FOSS version) and other tools as Osmand, Firefox, owncloud…
Beware that some app like signal need gapps to run properly, even the fork libresignal.
I also installed aptoide to download some app who work pretty well like Spotify.
your email address is unique…
Actually I’m back to Ubuntu phone from cyanogen. The recent updates to the Ubuntu OS have dramatically improved the user experience and the key things are now working for business: calendar, owncloud/nextcloud connectivity. There also seems to be a sudden burst in development for apps/programs. Even on this old Nexus 4 it’s working way more snappy than I’ve ever seen it and definitely quickly going for a home run. I will be purchasing an ubuntu-ready device when convergence is all working so that it has the hardware to handle that task. That in combination with a nextcloud box should be a phenomenal and safe way to exist in our world….