Build it on some cloud server. I built my own images for the emulator and an Odroid mini computer, but never for any phone. The source tree is some 9 or 10 GBs

Build it on some cloud server. I built my own images for the emulator and an Odroid mini computer, but never for any phone. The source tree is some 9 or 10 GBs, and I realized somewhere around the 2 GB mark that cloning it on my home connection is a waste of time and bandwidth. So I built them on a Linode 4GB server. Network and hard disk speeds were magnitudes better than anything at home. Took around 4-5 hours of reading and understanding the process (see links below) + 2-3 hours for each build. Removing vendor apps from the image is a simple matter of removing them from the correct config files. Since HTC seems to be a good open source citizen and makes their source code changes available, removing vendor apps and rebuilding an image is probably not very difficult. [1] http://source.android.com/source/index.html http://source.android.com/source/index.html [2] Building Custom ROM (2 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0 [3] Karim Yaghmour's Embedded Android series (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c