#ditching apple

If you're fed up with subscription-related shit, have your hackles up with Apple's censoring of Tumblr and are frustrated with Spotify Premium hacks getting constantly patched, there's an alternative.

YouTube Vanced acts, looks and reads like a Premium-enabled YouTube APK install - at no cost whatsoever. Its sister app, Music Vanced, is bundled inside their common app manager. It's slightly less feature-complete than the vanilla install of YT Music and will get you more features if you've rooted your Android device as a preliminary measure, but it also works perfectly well on my main unrooted Pixel 4 XL. All you need is enough know-how to enable sideloading apps on your phone. In many cases, it's in your Settings app, under Apps, then Special app access. That might change depending on your Android version or fork.

As to how to root your 'Droid phone of choice, if you're willing to give it a shot - XDA Dev has about one or two root methods for every flavor, color, denomination or fork of Android you could think of. If you're a complete newbie at this, think of rooting as being roughly as involved as jailbreaking an iDevice for an iOS version that isn't vulnerable to browser-based exploits. So if you were used to, say, blackra1n's Safari-based install and to tethered jailbreaks, you'll have a few extra hoops to jump through.

Don't panic, it's not mind-bogglingly involved; it just requires a basic understanding of Android's Recovery mode and of how to set your device in Fastboot mode. Most guides on XDA walk you through the entire process. Give yourself a few hours, make sure you've backed up everything that matters to you on your phone before you start, and then give it a go.

If, on the other hand, you're still a bit intimidated by Android, you can try out a custom ROM or one of the mainstream forks free-of-charge. All you need is a reasonably recent PC and the same SDK tools you'll have to install on PC to root your phone. Start Android Studio, click on Tools and then SDK Manager. From there, select the SDK Tools tab, and the latest version of Android Emulator you'll find in there, and click OK.

Back in Android Studio's main screen, click on Tools again, this time selecting the AVD Manager item. From there, follow the instructions to create and mount an Android 12 ISO file on a virtual machine that corresponds to the specs of whatever device you'll pick as a basis. Once you've clicked through the Wizard and started your VM, you'll have access to a slightly janky, if entirely functional installation of Android 12 on PC.

If all of the above scares you, you can also download BlueStacks if you're mostly used to testing games to try out new operating systems. Be aware, however, that BlueStacks is at least three Android versions behind, with Android 9 (Pie) being its latest Beta build. If you're seriously looking to test the waters, try out the SDK for yourself. If you're really serious about this, you can also spin Android on older PCs as a boot OS, and then brag about having the least-practical smartphone on the planet.