Get Pushbullet, Twilight, and whatever emulators you may want to use if you wish to do so. You might want to check out the Amazon Appstore or Amazon Underground for free apps that would normally be paid and Aptoide if you just want to pirate things. If you go with a root, you can get all sorts of goodies like Xposed Framework which will allow you to get various utilities like GravityBox for customizing your phone in pretty much every way imaginable, Greenify for controlling app hibernation, XPrivacy for managing app permissions and restricting unwanted permissions, and BootManager for allowing/preventing apps to start on boot. It's also recommended to pick up Titanium Backup which will allow you to easily backup, freeze, or delete certain processes on your phone. Aero Kernel Control can let you tweak just about every setting for your kernel on the fly. If you're looking for an ad blocker, AdAway does everything on a hosts file and will require a root, though I'm sure if you only want to block web ads you can always go with some mobile ad block extension for whatever browser you want to use.