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Comment by tribaal | Hacker News Reader

I live in Africa. When is it coming here? I'd love to have a cheap, supported android phone.

Most affordable android phones here are "tecno" (chinese samsung knockoffs), but it's notably hard to flash since not many people with the know-how own any.

By the way, if you do have the know-how to port i.e. cyanogenmod to a new device please get in touch - I'll be glad to send you a few handsets, and you'd make loads of people in developing countries a solid :)

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Those are all mediatek phones which they refuse to honor GPL and release the kernel sources. I suspect Android One will be the same. You can check out the CyanogenMod porting guide and pull the kernel and recovery settings from boot.img, modify clockwork mod with settings you found in boot.img to get root access then flash(most Chinese clones use fastboot to flash) CWM recovery and run a script in the porting guide they have to yank proprietary binaries off the device and attempt to fully port using the pre-compiled kernel you ripped from the boot image. I did it with a Mediatek i9300 clone from Alibaba but built and ran Replicant mod on it instead of CyanogenMod. Some things won't work like proprietary GPS and NFC but I didn't want those anyways.

If Android One Mediatek kernel is released can use it on matching Chinese clones unless it's some special kernel/chipset only made for Android One device. If we are lucky and that chipset is mass produced by Alibaba suppliers, and Google has the kernel source available we can get even cheaper phones than the One and run better software on it.

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_porting_intro

It's available now http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/09/16/android-4-4-4-kernel...

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