[patientzero]

I've always found the requirement to install these things before reboots odd and it leaves me afraid to do an upgrade (I have no memory of what I did last time and apparently if I do it differently everything will be irrecoverably different?)

I'd be happy if the process were always a full reset followed by choosing what to run until the next full reset.. And maybe it is (?) but I never understand what people are talking about in android land.

[timschumi]

> I've always found the requirement to install these things before reboots odd and it leaves me afraid to do an upgrade (I have no memory of what I did last time and apparently if I do it differently everything will be irrecoverably different?)

The only thing that matters is "did you have Google Apps or not?". This fact can not be changed without doing a factory reset, or your OS will be terribly confused. It shouldn't matter _which_ flavor of a Google Apps package you installed (although the officially recommended one only has one flavor anyways), for this purpose they are freely interchangeable. I also haven't seen any other addon that has this particular destructive trait, so you should be fine as long as you pay attention to "Google Apps or no Google Apps?".

> I'd be happy if the process were always a full reset followed by choosing what to run until the next full reset.. And maybe it is (?) but I never understand what people are talking about in android land.

You are free to do that, and this is basically the fallback option in case anything related to Google Apps goes wrong while upgrading. It's just that most users don't want to reset their devices each time that a major update appears, so the instructions jump through hoops to accommodate them.

Backups are (of course) always recommended, no matter the circumstances.