G300 to Moto G
My G300 has been getting tired. It's a little irritating that I know it's inherently defective. There's a flash memory issue which has resulted in dead phones if they had the wrong type of flash memory (which mine unfortunately has). I'm a little muddled from my reading, so I don't know if this death sentence is caused by, or just exacerbated by the use of custom ROMs. Anyway, the safest thing to do was to stick with an older CyanogenMod version. It's annoying that I was stuck on old Android and the phone's slowness has started to frustrate me, leading me to decide to get a new one.
I did consider a Nexus 5, but heard bad things about battery life which put me off; I thought I'd get frustrated with paying quite a lot (although they were on offer for £240 recently) and still not being quite satisfied.
Instead, the value for money budget smartphone at the moment seems to be the Moto G, so I picked one up for a penny under £100.
From first glance, it seems a great deal for what you get: nice 720p screen, front facing camera, quad core CPU; all a sizable upgrade over my G300 (which was around the same price about eighteen months ago). I haven't had much chance to use it yet. Initially, I was having issues rooting the phone with Motorola's server not recognising the phone's unlock data. A couple of days later all went fine, but I've only just got time to start setting it up again.
PDroid to XPrivacy
By setting it up, I mean the necessary business of moving existing data across from my old phone, as well as making sure my phone's rooted and running an ad-blocker and something to control app permissions for accessing my data.
I'm a big fan of PDroid on my current phone to restrict app permissions. Especially so these days with so many apps wanting unnecessary permissions. I don't even install that many third-party apps, but I find it incredibly invasive when apps that don't have any reasonable reason to, say, know your location want to find where you are.
Since I last installed a custom ROM, I found that Auto-Patcher has been deprecated and XPrivacy seems to be the permission control app of choice for Android now. You still need root permissions to use it, though it doesn't require ROM patching, which means you can use it with a stock, rooted ROM, and install it directly from Play Store.
There's a CyanogenMod port for Moto G, but it's only nightly at the moment, so I think I'll try and see how I get on with stock for now.