[HTC Desire 510] blaqueknight:
Some answers before you purchase

Hello GKNByNW,

1. Only one person on here said they have a 64-bit model that they bought in the U.S. from Cricket. You can probably ask the salesperson when you purchase it, but I think it's highly likely that the device you are going to buy will be 32-bit.

2. I don't know of a CWM for the 32-bit model. I was the same way. CWM was the only recovery I was used to. The first time I used TWRP was with this phone. I think you should try TWRP. I like it a lot. I have never used CWM Touch, but I'm sure TWRP may be like that. It is very user friendly. I don't know how you would go about making a backup of your stock recovery, but you should be able to use this one. It works great for my Boost phone. You may need to get familiar with adb and fastboot if you are not already. I don't know if we can just copy the recovery to where it needs to be, but most of us have been fastboot flashing it.

3. Write protection was included with Android KitKat. It has nothing to do with modding the phone. Google restricted some access to the sdcard, I believe for security reasons. When you flash a write-protect removed kernel, you can delete system apps, make changes to build.prop and make other changes. If you do not have a write-protect removed kernel, you can delete system apps, but when you restart the phone, they will return. You can also make changes to build.prop but when you restart they will not stick. I'm not sure of all of the things that will not stick if you have the stock kernel but those are a couple. Here is some more information: http://www.androidcentral.com/kitkat-sdcard-changes and https://source.android.com/devices/storage/index.html.

4. There are currently 2 kernels that most people use: Modded Desire 510 Kernel v2.6.1, which is tuned more for stability and Rhinstone-kernel, which is tuned more for performance. I haven't tried RevKernel and it hasn't been updated in a while, but you can check it out. Definitely check out the ROMs we have available and read through some threads to see which you like best.

5. The phone has 8GB internal, but we can only use ~1GB in the /data partition. I guess ~5GB is used for Android and Sense, since ~2GB is used for the /system partition. Check out this Storage Truth: https://goo.gl/photos/tCD1P26QTXM7my2r7

It's kind of weird, but this is the Storage Truth from my wife's phone, which has never been modded, and she has Cricket:

https://goo.gl/photos/uijoVA8Bk8tCtwe3A

She can still only use ~1GB, but I wonder why it shows ~4GB for the /data partition and only ~1GB for me.

After app updates and after you download a couple of apps the storage gets full, quick. The custom ROMS free up a lot of space. On a Jelly Bean based phone I had, without the sdcard restriction, I was able to integrate pretty much all of my apps on /system and have tons of room left over in /data. So I had so much space for apps and that phone didn't have as much "space" as this one has. On this one we're not so lucky. If you integrate the Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and the Gallery you will get force closes. There are more apps that will cause force closes if you integrate and delete them, but those are the main ones. You can delete the lockscreen with no issues, if you prefer the AOSP one. You can use Aparted and Link2SD to free up space. This method will allow you to download apps to your heart's content. Check out this thread to find out how to do that.