Finally make my Windows 8.1 OS sees my Nexus 5

For a long while, when I plugged my Nexus 5 to my Dell XPS quad core desktop computer, I did NOT see the device content, and when I developed with both Android Studio and Eclipse, I did NOT see my Nexus 5 shows up as one of the deploy-able device.  That really irritated me, but somehow I didn't have time to resolve that problem, until NOW.

I found this link that talk about the problem I was having, I followed everything EXCEPT that I didn't see "MTP USB Device", but another "XXXXXX USB Device" beside the WRONG ACER ADB INTERFACE.  So I picked that another one, and now the device shows up on Windows Explorer, and Andorid Studio sees the device.  Interesting though, when I connect the Nexus 5 to the desktop, I still see the name "ACER Device - ACER Composite ADB Interface".  But heck, as long as I can continue to develop, I am good.

BTW, didn't use the Google USB Driver.  Kind of strange.

Also, while copying files to the device is fine, DELETE seems to have problem. Odd.

I probably should NOT get a Nexus 9

Shopping definitely is an addiction.  Once you are in the mood of buying, the sensation of enjoying will drive you to buy even more stuff.  Since I am a sucker of buying gadget, the fact the new Nexus 9 coming out pushed me to once again consider whether I should buy it or not.

After some though process, as of this moment, I decided NO.

First of all, I am pretty satisfy with my iPad 3 and Nexus 7.  And now that I have an iPad Air 2, there's not much reason why I need a Nexus 9.

Second, there are a lot of apps that I enjoy using on iOS which does NOT existing on Android, specifically all those music and drawing related apps.

In addition, apps that supposed to be great on Android, like the ability to browse and play all sort of video content on my home network, doesn't work well in reality.  For instance, last night I spent quite some time to try out playing various video file on my Nexus 7, and found that a lot of times I got into slow performance and lagging problem during playback.  In fact, I tried Nexus 7, Eee Slate and Microsoft Surface 1, and turns out Microsoft Surface 1 has a best performance, most probably because probably because Microsoft knows better how to access content from a Microsoft network.  (Eee Slate is running Windows 10 Preview, so it may not be a fair comparison).

Finally, unlike iOS which support switching between app store in different country (a bit clumsy, but at least doable), Andorid forced me to stuck with US app store, which doesn't work well with my use case.

In fact, I probably still able to get all the Android 5 Lollipop fun because Lollipop will work on my first generation Nexus 7.  So there's really no need to get another gadget.

Back to Stock and Unroot on Nexus 7

My Nexus 7 is more or less a development machine, and as part of my development process, I need to test a tool called Mobile Iron.  It's the security solution that our company used.  So installed it, and it refused to install secured apps because it detected that my Nexus 7 has been "compromised", probably because it's rooted.

So to continue my work on it, I need to unroot it.  BUt how?

I used my office machine Dell Dimension M6600 running dual boot (Windows 7 Enterprise edition and Windows 8 Pro).  But then both failed to run the Nexus Root Tool 1.7.1 .

Then I realized that I successfully used a Netbook Lenovo S12 running Windows 7 Pro with Nexus Root Tool.  So I yanked it out, and sure enough it worked.

And so I carryout the unroot process, which is actually pretty simply:

• Launch Nexus Root Toolkit 1.7.2
• Click [Backup] to backup your device
• Click [Flash Stock + Unroot]

During the process, I needed to follow whatever instruction that came up on screen, but never the less, at the end, I have an stock Nexus 7 device.

2 more video player apps out of my phone

I loaded some Chinese dance videos to my andorid phone.  Some are flv, while others are avi and on.  I tried to play them, and found MoboPlayer and mVideoPlayer failed to load some of the videos.  And for that, they will stay out of my device.  DICE Player, BSPlayer and MX Player are still going strong.  So ... great!

Just because I uninstall you doesn't mean I hate you

Here's yet another round of my massive android software uninstall from my Galaxy Nexus phone.  I have this crave to keep my Galaxy Nexus lean and mean for several reasons:

• It's not a high end phone, so having lots of background process can seriously slow it the phone down.
• I don't see myself upgrading to another phone soon.  I like my Galaxy Nexus and I found it do great enough job to assist my daily life.  
• The more apps I have, the more time the phone will spent on updating.

So these are the apps I uninstalled recently:

Musical Instrument:

• SPC Demo, Real Piano, RD4 Demo : these are new breed of apps that provides digital musical instrument with low latency.  Finally Android has potential to do what Garage Band did on iOS device.  But then, I already have an iPod Touch generation 5 with Garage Band and other great musical instrument apps.  I don't need some promising but inferior apps on Andorid.

Explorer

• File Expert, File Manager, Astro File Manager: they are .. fine, but just not as awesome as ES File Explorer.  I still keep FX (File Explorer) because it doesn't have ads to annoy me, and it has some cloud access capability.

Wall Paper

• Mario Live Wallpaper, PhotoWall:  Yeah they are cute for a while, but eventually I got tired of them.

Voip:

• Line, GrooVe IP Lite, Kakao Talk, Viber, Bobsled Calling: I mainly use Talkstone, and have GV Phone as my backup just in case.  That should be it.

Audiobook: 

• Music Folder Player Free: it could be a good app, but I don't have time to play with it yet.

Time to pay up for Android apps that I like

I have $20 Google credit that I need to spent before Sept 30, and that spanned me to start looking various Andorid apps and see if there's any of them worthy to pay for.

The first one is DoggCatcher.  I've been keep looking and looking, and still found DogCatcher the best podcast app on Andorid.  Worthy of my $2.99.

For local network browser, I have to say that the free ES File Explorer still beats the rest of them hands down.  Here's why I have problem with the others:

• FX+ : The + feature cost a few bucks, which is fine if it works.  But it doesn't.  Network connection takes like forever to complete.
• FileExpert: Tried the network feature, and just keep giving me "Cannot Open"
• File Manager: Same ultra long network connection problem.
• Astro File Manager: Got the error "DUP_NAME"

At the end, I settle with ES File Explorer.  Oddly enough, the product is free, and I don't know how to pay for it.

Next stop: Video player.  Once again, there are lot of apps, and I settled with a free one called Dice Player.  Don't know how to pay for it.

Then, audiobook player.  This one is odd, because I tried to pay for MortPlayerAudiobook, but then found Akimbo Player does a better job.  Both are free.

Next, VOIP.  I settled with Talkatone because it has both iOS and Android version.  And by paying US$9.99, I can ultimately get rid of ads on both the Android and iOS version.  Great feature, gotta say.  I also like GVPhone, but since I already paid for Talkstone, it doesn't make sense to pay for another one unless I found something that I really hate about it.

So there it is.  After researching for whole day, I ended up paying 2 apps.  Hopefully, I can find more apps that worthy to pay for.

Another thing I learned about Google Play: if you buy something, the among will be instantly credited from your account.  But if you cancel a transaction, it actually takes quite some time to credit the amount back.  At least I haven't seen it credited back to my Google Play credit yet.  Either that or the amount credited back to my another credit card.  This is so freaking confusing.

(Update) The refund finally comes back to my Google Play credit.

Journey of bringing JellyBean 4.3 to Nexus 7 gen 1

I was (and still am) pretty darn frustrated when I realized that OTA Jelly Bean 4.3 failed to install on my Nexus 7 generation 1.  It's like some hidden problem in my Nexus 7 and I need to resolve it.  I knew it's going to a long journey to investigate the issue and eventually resolve it, so I tried to push it til weekend.  And this is that weekend, so here we go.

My very last resort is to wipe out my Nexus 7 and start everything from new, I was ALMOST OK to do that except that I have a Puzzle & Dragon game on that device, and I have quite some progress on it and didn't want to lost those.  Fortunately, Gunho provides a solution, although I haven't tested out it yet.

So now that I have it taken care of, I am now ready for the worst case.

When OTA installation failed, my logical next step is to think about side loading the update .  That approach brought me into some trouble as I found that the Android SDK I had didn't seemed to be working.  So I had to use Eclipse, and then [Andorid SDK Update] to update it.  After I had it updated, I found that on my Dell XPS desktop, I am not able to get the full drive view (14+ Gb) of my Nexus 7.  So I switched to the Windows side of my MacMini.  Now I got trouble because the Nexus 7 Windows driver did not see the Nexus 7 after Nexus 7 got into Recovery ADB mode.  There is a hack to fix that problem, But that hack doesn't work with my MacMini since it can't boot to allow F8 getting into safe mode.  So now I am on my S12 netbook running Windows 7, hoping that this would help solving the problem.

And then I found that the stupid command prompt on this S12 piece of shit netbook doesn't recognize the Z Drive I mapped for access the adb command line.  So I have to explicitly map it on command line.

Now I need to get to:
Z:\_Apps\AndroidMobileDev\android-sdk\platform-tools
and then example what I have:

Adb devices  : shows me the device.  So it's a good start. Now I do this:

adb reboot recovery

And trying to do "adb devices" and found that no device is connected.

Same as what a lot of people complain about.  It's time to give this fix a try.

Eventaully, I got the sideloading working using the fix mentioned above.  It worked exactly as stated, but then I need to do it this way (instead uninstall the previous "Android Composite ADB Interface"):

- Right click on "Android Composite ADB Interface"
- Select "Update Driver Software ..."
- Click "Browse my Computer for driver software."
- After you tried to install, you may get a message saying that a better driver already exist.  If that is the case, you need to force to system to use your hacked driver by:

- select "Let me pick from a list of device drives on my computer".  And in there pick the one your hacked.
- You will then get a warning saying that the driver is not certified.  Just say OK.

This works on Windows 7.  On Windows 8 you need to reboot in a mode that ignore driver certification using [F8].

Now I get sideloading working, but then, I got "assert failed" and then "installation aborted".

So I have a feeling that I might need to go extreme by restoring the system into fresh factory mode.  The senario 2 of this seemed to explain my exact situation. But then I am stuck with the problem which the bootloader step giving me this:

sending bootloader ... okay
'writing bootlader'.... failed (remote: (invalid state))

Just like 
Just like what have been mentioned here.  Now I feel stuck.

So I installed "Wug's Nexus Root Toolkit v1.7.1", and then did both backup on all apps and specific app (the only one I care) using [Backup].  And then I use [Flash Stock + Unroot] to flash the device to stock JWR66Y (4.3).

But I still got problem.  It was the same "invalid state" issue.

Finally I found out the solution.

All is need is to restore back to Android 4.2 (nakasi-jdq39-factory-c317339e.tgz) instead of 4.3.  Once done (and connect to WiFi), the system will kick off the 4.3 update.  And I got it completed successfully.

Then I used Wug's Nexus Root Toolkit v1.7.1 to restall the data for the only game that I care by:

• Turn on the development mode of android, and then turn on USB debugging.
• Use Nexus Root Tookit to root Andorid 4.3 on Nexus 7.
• Install the app 
• Use Nexus Root Toolkit to restore app data that I previsouly backed up.

Now I have a clean Nexus 7, with latest Andorid 4.3.

Next time if I got problem updating the later OS (like 4.4), for the worst case, I will have to do these:

• Use Nexus Root Toolkit to backup all data
• Use [Flash Stock + Unroot] in Nexus Root Toolkit to roll back to stock Andorid 4.3.
• Apply official OTA update
• Restore apps
• Restore app data.

After all these, I suddenly realize the value of keeping my Lenovo S12 netbook running Windows 7 Home edition: for all the dirty hacking tasks.