Hi! I’m swapping my daily android phone for the nth time today and going through my set-up “check-list”. As apps are updating/installing, I thought I’d check in with the hive-mind, what are you all doing to make the process easier? Maybe you know of a way to self-host some sort of android profile server? I’ll post my process + list of goals & gripes below and if you have any tips or suggestions about what I can do better, I’d love to hear them!!

Current Process

• flash clean rom
• walk through the setup process
• enable developer mode + adb
• go through default app list disabling/uninstalling crap i don’t want
• use ‘fdroidcl’ to install all my fdroid apps
• adb push a gpg private key to import into OpenKeychain
• generate a ssh keypair in Password Store, put public key on my server via ConnectBot, clone passwords repo
• log into firefox sync
• log into joplin
• configure fairmail
• configure davx
• log in to google account
• download play store apps I was missing
• go through apps one by one, logging in to accounts + doing configuration
• deal with fucking whatsapp
• hold old phone + new phone side by side and made sure i got everything

Goals & Gripes

App Installation

fdroidcl helps a LOT here, i can have a list of my minimal required packages - password management solution, browser, and notes get installed and it solves a lot of bootstrapping problems for me. I never need to do the dance of opening chrome, downloading fdroid, giving chrome install permissions, installing fdroid, etc.

that said, it is /slow/ and obviously limited to installing apps from fdroid repositories. maybe the slowness i can solve with self-hosting an fdroid repo, but i’m still stuck with having to install a bunch of apps manually either through aurora store, or play store.

App configuration

If i could push in arbitrary app configurations i would be sooooo happy. certain apps have config export/import, like my launcher, but that’s far from all of them. i’ve tried a number of “backup” options, like Titanium, but obviously they don’t work without root and don’t always work /with/ root, especially going across devices. I’ve vaguely considered using Appium for this but … ehhhh.

De-googling

Okay, so I can probably solve the apk problem somehow… I can solve the contacts sync… but I really like android auto, and that’s a non-starter without a system google account afaik.

Whatsapp

i’ve never once managed to successfully move whatsapp to another device and not lose my chat history. it starts restoring from a backup, fails, and kicks me into being logged in without any chance of a restore.

Edit: oh and if you have any suggestion that’d make me not hate re-pairing wearos watch… 🥺