[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] marnick.leau:
Hiya

I have an Alcatel Onetouch Pop C1 4015D (and for the record, I'm never buying this brand or similar junk again). I just got it un-bricked after a few months thanks to the online USB firmware updater. It's currently in pretty much its factory-default state again, preinstalled crapware and all.

What I'd like to do is install a custom ROM on it, to have a clean system I can actually enjoy owning, e.g. AOSP (if that is what I think it is: the basic, clean Android system). The problem is that I'm getting a little overwhelmed with information, tutorials linking to more tutorials, tutorials linking to downloads for which I have to "complete a survey" and such (abort abort abort), 2 different tutorials for the same thing stating different ADB commands, a few outright scams, etc etc etc. There's tons of information out there, but 90% of it seems wrong, irrelevant, device-specific or otherwise unusable. I've already spent hours on this and still haven't gotten anywhere.

I'd be very grateful if someone actually reliable could walk me through the entire, correct process, please. :fingers-crossed:

I'm just going to write down the bits and pieces of info I already have:

I've already rooted it with Framaroot; no problems there, superuser works.

I've found this site that lists several ROMs, presumably specifically for the C1, including the standard ROM and a cleaned version: tinyurl dot com/o24wqoe. The AOSP one strikes my fancy and is on my SD card already.

The same site says I can just put the provided ROMs on my SD and install them as updates via stock recovery, but I highly doubt that because I read everywhere you specifically can't do that. Sounds like fake advice to me.

I'm told I'd need to unlock my bootloader, but once in fastboot/bootloader mode none of the offered fastboot unlock commands really do anything. The "..." appears in my console and then nothing.

I've tried installing TWRP and CWM recoveries, but you know, "your device is not supported". There's this video of a C1 with a custom recovery (watch?v=_TGgXIp3fWM) and the comments claim it's CTRecovery, but I can't even find anything about that. I already submitted requests for a fix for my device to twrp and cwm half a year ago before I bricked this thing, and one person promised he was gonna make a build for me, but nothing came from any of that.

I think that's just about all the useful things I can extract from this whole mess of information I have...

Please help me make sense of this overload of info and device-specific shenanigans, and walk me through what seems to be such a simple process for everyone with a mainstream device?

For the record, I'm back down to barely being up-to-date on what is what anymore. I'm more than familiar enough with the theoretical side (bootloaders, partitions, bios, etc) because of my heavy computer usage (professional programmer), but once I get into Android I'm just lost. All that fancy terminology nobody seems to bother to explain, things that are taken for granted but aren't really obvious (like a guy demonstrating the installation of a custom ROM, and only mentioning 10 minutes into the excessively long video that you need to install a custom this and custom that first), so many alternative methods for the same thing that have different dependencies (unlocking bootloader vs custom recovery), etc... I don't know anymore what's device-specific and what isn't, who is telling the truth, what a given tutorial is actually making me achieve in the end, etc. TL;DR I'm lost, I'm not stupid but I'm not gonna pretend to know anything about Android's subsystems anymore at this point.