M52 Red Note ROM Updation and Modding

MLais obviate the ROM scene with their clean ROM. Taking out the trash is much easier. There are many bloatware lists already online, just Google, "safe to delete apk files", or "BLOATWARE LISTS". Few pertain to this year, MediaTek, or Lollipop. I probably just lack imagination, or sleep, to create an original post tonight. Enough waffle:

Full name	Display name	Purpose	Size (Mb)	Confi- dence (<10)	Effect of removal
/system/res	Sound and Audio Tests	Test data	10	9	None
/system/app/MtkWeatherProvider	Unseen	Reads tea leaves	0.3	9	None
/system/app/MtkWeatherWidget	Unseen	Rolls bone dice	9	9	None
com.android.deskclock	Clock	Widget. inferior alarm	2	9	None
com.agold.launcher.wallpaper	System Wallpaper	Default MTK wallpaper	10	9	Features FC if accessed
com.android.wallpaper	Live (wallpaper)	Default android wallpaper	2	8	None
com.google.android.marvin-talkback	Talk	Screen reader	1.5	4	No reader
AgingTest.apk	Unseen	Factory test for battery, not trojan	11	8	None
agold.AgoldFactoryTest.apk	Unseen	Factory test for QA	9	9	?

Anything else, LEAVE ALONE! These are only my opinions, think of them as mini reviews. Perhaps I can add another column for more phones once the porting scene develops.

Another refinement for rooted users is moving favoured apps to the /system partition. One advantage is they become both privileged (in apps-priv folder) and protected. Immediately removing root access promotes this protection. System apps update themselves outside of the system partition which exposes them to at least the danger of accidental erasure (rolling back) when a factory reset is performed. Most factory resetting here is done when I mess up something with my tinkering

1) Add favoured apps. File explorers, alarm clocks, music and browsers, of permanent utility.
2) Move them with another app, from /data/app to /system/app.
3) Delete default system apps that have been superseded by new system apps. HINT, most likely the /system/priv-apps. @cough@ AOSP keyboard @cough@4) Write down what gets changed so it can be repeated if disaster strikes
5) Beware of modifying /system/build.props. The trivial mods I made the 20150526 killed its successor. Even tweaking a single line cause an intermittent fault screen fault.

update 3/10/2015

I've since modified build.props, it's not having much effect though- couldn't rename the device in wifi and bluetoot. com.agold.launcher.wallpaper was rev-enged and deflated to allow wallpaper theming, it appears to have worked but did complain initially.

I'll be upgrading before I do any more modding. Whatever bugs I come up against can be dismissed by Google because my device is already "broken" once rooted. Google is slowly starting to toe the security industry's party line; support for rooted devices is not a given. eFuses and SE Linux are meant to support consumer services to rival Apple, time will tell how well this direction will integrate Android's dev community.