Today after dinner, my dad called me over, saying he was having trouble with getting to his email on his tablet, an HP Touchpad. Evidently, Google has ended support for WebOS (I don't blame 'em, WebOS is a dead platform), so he could not access his email on the device. After a little while, I came up with a possible solution - flash Android 5.1.1 on it. With his full approval, I started working on flashing Android onto his aging tablet.

Finding a ROM wasn't that hard. People have been keeping the ancient tablet alive by porting various versions of Android to it. I actually downloaded the first ROM I found and followed a guide on Lilliputing on how to flash Android onto a Touchpad using a utility called TPToolkit. Now this is where things got hard.

It wouldn't accept the recovery and gapps zip files I had on the device. Why? I don't know. So I had to search for a gapps and recovery zip that TPToolkit liked. Eventually I found both files and Android successfully flashed onto the device. Only thing is, once I booted it into Android, it was missing the Google apps. After a bit of fucking around to try getting the gapps on the device, I gave up and tried flashing just the gapps, then found out TPToolkit didn't like the filesize of the zip file I was using. So I had to get a smaller one, which I did. That file successfully installed.

Then came setting up his email account, Google Play (so he can get any apps he needs), Facebook and LinkedIn. It was relatively painless until I tried downloading Facebook, which kept returning an error. After failing to resolve the error I tried removing and re-adding his email account, then installing a Facebook apk. It worked, and every other app I've tried downloading from Google Play downloaded without a problem. Dunno why not Facebook, though, but oh well. And that was basically all I needed to do to set it up for him. Anything else he needs, he can (probably) find it in Google Play.

I'll have to give him a tour of Android tomorrow, but now his tablet is running on a not-dead platform. You're welcome, dad.