Sunday, November 27, 2016

Decrapification of the PRIV

From the Urban Dictionary:
decrapification - The act of removing all the pre-installed crap from your Dell or HP computer PRIV smartphone. 
Other than the one time problem I had with Carrier IQ I really never had a problem with the AT&T bloatware on the BlackBerry PRIV.

In late summer 2016 many PRIVs started experiencing "No Service" when using LTE. There was some speculation that the problem was related to changes AT&T made in their LTE network to support the iPhone 7 running a new radio chip. In early November BlackBerry released an apk that corrected the "No Service" situation.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems that AT&T has pretty much walked away from the PRIV. Obviously they dumped a large portion of their PRIV inventory onto liquidators as I bought mine for $300 with a carrier unlock code taped to the unsealed AT&T box.

A couple of days after BlackBerry released the "No Service" apk they rolled out a 1.8GB (not a typo) Over the Air (OTA) update to remove all the AT&T software from the now orphaned AT&T BlackBerry PRIVs.


Just for icing on the cake, this OTA included the Android November security updates.


The AT&T boot animation (including music) is gone and the software updates now come from BlackBerry, not AT&T.


Maybe it should be called the Nexus PRIV.

You really have to give some props to BlackBerry for this.

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