After working on porting Nerves to this fairphone 2, it got me thinking: “how far back can I go ?”.
It turns out I have a few Android devices in a drawer here, and one of my oldest devices is the Google Nexus 7 tablet from 2012.
I was pleased to find out that this tablet supports U-Boot so I embarked, yet again, on a most probably useless journey to bring Nerves to Android e-waste. They sold several millions back in the days, so maybe this will be useful for someone out there 
Replacing the stock bootloader by UBoot was not so easy. You need the battery to be charged enough (mine is quite dead), and bring the device in APX mode, which meant starting the device with an unplugged battery then plugging it in again while connected. Anyway…
After some tinkering with some nerve configuration, I got it working.
Ethernet over USB works, wifi too, there are a couple of things I need to look into but I managed to burn a simple firmware to it.
Overall, despite replacing the stock bootloader, the process was quite easier than I thought, there were less custom packages involved and with U-Boot, I have full access to the internal memory, the original Android partition table is gone.
For those interested, the system is here 
My next victim might be a Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo from 2014… but if you have some popular old Android devices you would like to get rid of and you are coming to NervesConfEU/Goatmire Elixir in September, maybe you can bring them… 
