I use Amazing Weather hd as my lock screen, which takes care of the weather issue for me. But as far as other live tiles, you can turn any of them off if you wa

I use Amazing Weather hd as my lock screen, which takes care of the weather issue for me. But as far as other live tiles, you can turn any of them off if you want. I mean, you COULD just make a start screen that looked like android/ios with a ton of icons if you really wanted to. I don't use Facebook so I can't comment on that, but most apps I've used (twitter, linkedin, hacker news, readit) have settings for syncing. I only let readit sync in the background personally. The notifications bar itself is only there for a few seconds, so I'm not sure what issue you could possibly have with it. Notifications appear on the app tiles themselves, which I prefer (especially for when I add a person to my start screen and they call/text/email me). It doesn't function the same way as android/ios, but I prefer it. Every App Store is full of garbage, there's no denying it. I've found the windows App Store much easier to wade through, though. It's still far below the amount of apps in the android/ios stores, and the few top rated apps are almost always the official (or best) apps. I haven't found an issue with apps, but it am not a huge app guy. I mostly use twitter and readit (for reddit, obviously). I haven't faced any issues like your last one either, so I can't really comment. I have verizon and they have next to no support for windows phone, so I could see it happening.