[ONE Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] hardya:
Brand New OnePlus One rooted and with adware etc

I am a very newbie to not all but many of the particular issues in this post so would be grateful of any newbie taylored advice.

Background:

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I purchased a Oneplus one recently, stocked and fulfilled by amazon with amazon returns policy but seller was a chineese company.

It was advertised as 100% Original Oneplus One New Cell Phone

The phone arraived and appeared to already be rooted

evidence:

Barclays App says it is rooted and won't run. It ran fine on my Nexus 4

I can connect via adb and set to su straight away

The phone appeared to have arrived with significant malware / adware with popups and auto launch ad in browser pages and bloteware / PUPS(?), and other issues. After a great deal of research checking notifications and trial and error I disabled the following, some via settings\apps some via adb, pm ... disable ...

2048 (com.digiplex.game)

App Manager (com.shyz.steward)

Browser (com.android.browser)

Caller ID (com.android.tools.callassistant)

Clean Master (com.cleanmaster.mguard)

Cool Browser (com.cool.coolbrowser)

DU Speed Booster (com.dianxinos.optimizer.duplay)

Magic Photo (cn.dotui.magicphoto)

Videos (com.haolianluo.video)

and disabled gestures due to torch issues

The phone now seems quite stable.

I installed MalwareBytes, however None of the items it identifies is it able to disable/uninstall I set it not to scan automatically but it continues to tell me I have not responded to its list of issues, but I have responded by selected them, but on selection it tries to uninstall them but fails.

I was able to disable one of them via adb because it provided the package name for that one but:

CallerID.apk (disabled in settings\apps)

coolbrowser.apk (disabled in settings\apps)

201507140923731g.apk

AppStore.apk

I do not know how to uninstall (or disable at least on 2 of them) and I do not know how to refer to them from package manager because I don't have the package name.

Key Questions:

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I am familiar with much of software engineering and programming but not with mobile phone OS / disk / memory / file system, etc. I am having a lot of difficulty getting to grips with the vocabulary, definitions and terminology depending what you read.

- Some say OnePlus from factory comes with cyanogenmod but is not rooted

- So one wonders how my phone go to be rooted if the seller is a retailer

- Some say if the phone is rooted the warentee is invalidated. What do you think?

- WhatsApp says the phone has a custom rom and watsapp may not work properly with a custom rom

It is very difficult to get to the bottom of exactly what the difference is between a stock rom

and a custom rom. Some seem to be saying cyanogenmod is a custom rom, but then others say what

comes on the phone from the mobile manufacturer is a stock rom, eg HT Sense or in the case of

OnePlus, cyanogenmod! Is it only a custom rom if it is somehow NOT proven to be a

custom rom validated by the mobile manufacturer in factory (i.e. stock rom)?

- Some say having a custom rom invalidates warrantee, is this right?

- How do i prove that the rooting and the custom rom were not introduced by me?

- I have thought about factory reset, but I cannot manage to find anything that tells

me what this actually means and does, only how to do it.

- does a factory reset actually do what it suggests. I have read that factory reset does

not involve going to the manufacturers site and obtaining an appropriate image and flashing

it to the phone so I do not quite understand how else it could guarantee it

- If a factory reset will just make it like it was when I received it then that I do not want.

- Can I and ought I to flash a fresh image on the phone to get it like it WOULD HAVE been

had I bought it from OnePlus factory on invite and not through a mediator

- Finally. There is a notification "System Update is ready" . When I select this it appears

to download something (next version of cyanogenmod I guess though I don't recognise the version

number against any cyanogenmod versions) then it restarts and goes to a recovery app.

At this stage it is not completely intuitive what one should do and it seems to want you

to navigate to a location.

Now, I think I could probably figure this out with some reading but two things come to mind:

1) Presumably for a from factory OnePlus phone this kind of ambiguous unintuitive update

process would not be going on for people who just bought their phone and knew nothing

so it suggests the phone is in a different state to that. I also read you need root

already to install a (good) recovery app.

2) I am loath to do this update since it is not clear whether the update is this retailers

system update and will reintroduce all that I have disabled to create stability. Therefore

up to now I have always selected just do nothing and reboot. I favor stability over

features.

I am kind of inclined now I have managed to get it stable to just stick with it as it is and just use it without any further updates / resets / flashes and without returning it, but...

Sorry to ask all these questions. I would be grateful of any advice. Can be given with the assumption that I understand foundational general stuff ram, rom (though this word seems to be used differently to what I'm used to), flash, image, partition etc, but not that I actually know all about how the android/cyanogenmod platform is laid out and behaves as an installation.

Thank you.