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New to rooting, have some basic questions...

PacificaBren

PacificaBren

Well-Known Member
Hello, my phone is a T-Mobile Android K7. My only reason for wanting to root it is to get rid of some of the pre-installed apps, because the internal storage is only 8GB, and those pre-installed apps refuse to let themselves be relocated to the SD card.

So, in no particular order, here are the questions that have come up for me:

1. In BEFORE YOU ROOT READ THIS!, we are told to make lots of nandroid backups, but there's no link to instructions on how to do so. Is there a preferred tutorial I should be using in order to learn how to do this?

I know I could ask Google, but I just figure not all tutorials are created equally, so I'm asking y'all.

2. When I verify a file, will the output be easy enough for a lay person to understand that I'll know whether the results are good or bad? I have a Macintosh, so I'd be using that or using the Android apps mentioned.

3. This page seems to suggest that if I find the forum for my specific phone model, I will find a subform within it that is dedicated to rooting that model. Yet when I look around, I don't think that's what I'm finding. Am I misunderstanding what is being said?

4. Also, is there a forum here for my particular phone? I don't see one listed for the LG K7, but GSMArena says an alternate name for the K7 is the Tribute 5 LS675. There is also no forum for that model here, but I see there is a forum for the LG Tribute LS660. Is that the model most similar to mine, and should I hang out there for the rooting info that would be most specific to my device?

Thank you in advance for your help and input!
 
Hello, this thing has Android 5.1.1 on it. Last night, I allowed it to install a bunch of updates from LG and from T-Mobile, so I guess it's as up-to-date as it can be.
 
PacificaBren said:
4. Also, is there a forum here for my particular phone? I don't see one listed for the LG K7, but GSMArena says an alternate name for the K7 is the Tribute 5 LS675. There is also no forum for that model here, but I see there is a forum for the LG Tribute LS660. Is that the model most similar to mine, and should I hang out there for the rooting info that would be most specific to my device?
Click to expand...

Here's the link for your LG K7 here at Android Forums:
http://androidforums.com/devices/lg-k7.2136/
Also, when you're dealing with smartphones don't assume that just because the model number might have similarities that it will apply to your phone. Phone hardware is configured very specifically so when it comes to rooting you want to focus only on what applies to your particular model I.D.
There are some threads discussing rooting your phone, most comments appear to refer to using KingRoot, an app you use to root your phone without needing a computer. Personally I'm not a fan of KingRoot as it installs its own kinda/sorta malware but for a lot of phones it's the only option that works. Of course once you are rooted you can clean up the cruft so it's not all bad.
You might also want to look through the LG K7 pages on XDA Developers, a very reputable source. There are some postings specifically for T-Mobile LG K7's:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/lg-k7
https://forum.xda-developers.com/general/general/t-mobile-lg-k7-thread-t3481844
 
You do know that removing those apps won't give you any more space? Pre-installed apps live in the system partition, your apps in the data partition.

Any data those apps store, and any updates to them, do occupy "your" space. But if you clear data, uninstall updates, then disable the apps in question that will save you exactly the same storage as uninstalling them would - and in most cases can be done without rooting.

(when I say updates, I mean those via the Play Store - any that come as part of a system update go to the system partition).
 
Thank you for the info, svim and Hadron!

Hadron, you've really given me something to ponder. I think this will be the last time I buy a phone with such a paucity of internal storage. It's frustrating that I can't just have the Play Store install new apps directly onto the SD card. That would save me a lot of hassle, I think.
 
Hadron, you've solved my problem. Before I saw your post, I had just 348MB of free internal storage.

I just uninstalled updates for a bunch of apps I never use (and discovered a few I'd thought were factory bloatware that couldn't be deleted actually could be), and now I have 1.06GB of free internal storage.

Thank you!

It's deeply troubling that just allowing the phone to go about doing its updates would cause the phone to run out of internal storage. This is the kind of thing you'd expect from a low-end Windows computer from 1998, not a modern phone.

Oh well. Thanks again!
 
Yeah, I personally would not buy a phone with less than 32GB plus SD, and will really be looking for at least 64GB internal. With 8GB you are unlikely to have more than 3.5GB left for your stuff even when straight out of the box, and phones are suffering the problem that PCs have long suffered: apps that just keep getting bigger and more bloated as time goes on. It is very reminiscent of Windows in the 90s: as computers became more powerful, some software developers seemed to think this was a licence to use more and more resources to provide the same functionality.

As for installing direct to sd, storing apps has never been the purpose of sd in Android. Originally you couldn't do it at all, the ability to move /part/ of an app to sd was introduced in 2.2 as a stop-gap, and removed in 4.0. If a phone still has that it's because the manufacturer added it back in, since it's no longer part of the base OS. But it was only ever moved part of the app, and none of the internal data. To do more than that you either need a device that supports the Android 6 "adoptive storage" feature or you need to root and use something like Link2SD. Personally storing apps on SD doesn't appeal (been there, done that, but sd is slow and unreliable), so I'm sticking to devices which don't need it.
 
Thanks, good to know. So far, I don't seem to have had any problems (or noticeable slowdown) from moving many of my apps to my SD card. The only exceptions, so far, have been with Simple Image Editor, which could not successfully save an edited pic unless I moved the app back to internal memory, and with Waze, which could never be successfully moved to the SD card, even though that appeared to be an option.
 
Moving app data (possible with root utilities such as Link2SD, or the Android 6 adoptable storage) will slow things more than just moving the apk and library, which is all the old "move to sd" button actually does. That way should only really affect the time to load an app to begin with.
 
with low-end phones you *may* not notice that much of a slowdown. I'm using a cheapo Chinese phone (HomTom HT17 4G) running Marshmallow. It currently has 1.47GB free out of 8.0GB, with only 12 extra apps installed. I'm going to use a 32GB Class 10 UHS-1 card as adoptive storage. I suspect that there will be very little difference in speed. in a flagship phone I suspect the difference in performance could be quite apparent.
 
The best solution is to root your phone and use Link2SD so that you can decide what apps to move to SD card and what apps to remain in internal storage.

Big apps like Facebook should remain in internal storage due to its huge data files, or its sister app Messenger too. Those apps could use up 1GB of storage combined.
 
Facebook is just an example, the principle is that you leave the app you use most frequently in the internal storage for better performance.
 
PacificaBren said:
It's deeply troubling that just allowing the phone to go about doing its updates would cause the phone to run out of internal storage. This is the kind of thing you'd expect from a low-end Windows computer from 1998, not a modern phone.

Oh well. Thanks again!
Click to expand...

It's still the kind of thing you can expect from a low-end Windows 10 computer in 2017. [emoji14]
 
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