[G3 Android Development] Iffy27:
For privacy and battery lovers

Here is one for the anti-Google junkies using Fulmics, who value privacy in their phone and battery life (0.3% per hour), and have advanced Android knowledge (adb, services, backup&restore).

I attached a shell script fragment (run using "sh /sdcard/Temp/filename") which will disable most annoying Google Play background activity, while keeping Google Maps, Youtube and Chrome (no sync; I use latest Chrome-Dev) functional. G-Mail is untested since I presume you run your own server. There is no wakelock bug eating battery and the most prominent partial wakelock under Fulmics 1.0 in my phone right now is bluedroid_timer at 0% eating 37 seconds in 10 hours of uptime. BetterBatteryStats suggests drain of 0.2-0.3% per hour. I think that is very much okay. I might get even lower if I remove the 32 GB SD card.

The Google Play Store ist disabled in Apps and I do not allow my phone captive portal probes ("settings put global captive_portal_detection_enabled 0" in adb root shell). This might provoke brief error messages after wifi association about internet connection problems. Ignore those, you will know better. I install everything from ADK files because basically I do not trust Google or anyone else to act in my interest when updating to a later release. If you see people say "my phone worked like a charm in 4.4 and in 5.0/5.1 it gets hot with very bad battery life" then you know an update introduced them to the world of partial wakelock regressions. The culprit being sometimes Google Play services, sometimes the bluetooth stack, sometimes something a vendor pushed down to you. Well, you decide if you want that.

I audited everything in the phone through Wifi from boot using tcpdump, and I use AFWall to limit which apps can even talk to the internet. Speaking about AFWall, right now I only allow -11 (kernel), -14 (ntp), 10108 AdAway, 10104 Chrome Dev, 10021 Downloads, Download Manager, Media Storage, 10023 Email, 10007 Google Services Framework,... 10101 Maps, 10083 Weather and 10097 Youtube.

In AdAway I custom block these hosts (I use a later AdAway which also adds IPv6 entries to ::1 which is similar to 127.0.0.1)

127.0.0.1 www.lgcpm.com
127.0.0.1 static-avc.lglime.com
127.0.0.1 nist1-ny.ustiming.org
127.0.0.1 nist1-lnk.binary.net
127.0.0.1 time-nw.nist.gov
127.0.0.1 nist.time.nosc.us
127.0.0.1 time.nist.gov
127.0.0.1 nist1-la.ustiming.org

Did you know LG's DRM-Service queries time services on its own? Guess they are NIST fans and need the current time to see, if your DRMed media is still good to be played. I disabled all auto-updating from LG and Fulmics, I only do ZIP flashes from recovery so far. Might give Fulmics OTA a try later on. Other than that I see no point why the phone should talk to LG at all. This is caught using AFwall.

As for gps.conf (attached as gps.conf.txt) I made two changes:

XTRA_SERVER_QUERY=0 will activate the XTRA_SERVER_1..3 entries and then I only use one NTP server line: NTP_SERVER=pool.ntp.org. Why? Because ntp.org through its delegated DNS zone and its own DNS servers will geolocate the querying IP of your phone and then give you close NTP servers automatically. Roaming NTP service, isn't that something. I leave everything else as set by LG.

All in all, I am quite happy now with this phone.