Related
With my old tablet the custom roms always meant a performance increase too, but:
I've tried pretty much well every single custom rom available for this tablet by now and i still havent managed to find one that actually increases the performance of the tablet. When im running the stock firmware i get about 7500-7600 on quadrant and my browser is really responsive and stuff. There's not been a single custon rom out there that has even performed better then 5600 on quadrant. Is it just me, or are the custom roms not hat good performance wise?
EDIT: By better performance i mean how snappy the tablet feels, using benchmarks as a secondary frame of reference.
Not sure if quadrant is doing a good job. I also am getting same results as you with 7xxx for stock and 5xxx for all CM based ones. Although the CM roms feel smoother here.
Sent from my SGP311 using XDA Premium HD app
I abstained the vote cause the question does not bear a black and white / yes or no answer anymore these days.
In my humble opinion, and I picked up the smartphone / PDA / mobile device modding bug back about when this site catered to the the original HTC XDA almost exclusively, and Steve Jobs was merely having wet dreams about his iPhone (*1)... nodded RIMs have gotten to a state where they are overvalued. Saying a custom ROM is always way ahead of stock is like saying "one device with a fixed featureless fits everyone perfectly".
Custom ROMs had their deserved heyday when the industry loaded up near every carrier distributed smartphone with scrappy bloatware that made you weep. Depending on the mobile OS at any given time it was nigh impossible to get rid of that stuff, unless you flashed the whole shebang. From there on the custom ROM scene kinda exploded along with the market distribution of smartphones and later on tablets, certainly owed to the introduction of Android over older generation closed source systems, which enabled much more in-depth possibilities of adding novel features, fixing stuff that was basically broken out of the box and integrating all of this nicely.
(For a frame of reference: I tossed my PalmPilot and Nokia phone when the HTC Wallaby (Telekom MDA or so)hit the shelves... Early adopter by nature and I thought combining cellphones and PDAs, bother which I used avidly was the most revolutionary idea since the combustion engine. This was generation Windows Pocket PC, basically a PDA with cellphone feature thrown in as an afterthought (the antenna actually doubles a stylus compartment). Phone integration was a PITA on good days. On bad, long work days it might just happen that your moody battery would jump from 35% to flat out dead within a mere six minute phone call. Yet, no biggie right? Well, it was, the devices had no non volatile storage. Dead battery means go home, pray your last phone backup is recent enough and restore the entire thing. I spent a lot of time fixing this device (windows style - shoehorning in binary OS components from newer PocketPC versions and prodding the registry on the phone (!)...) to a point where it was almost usable as PDA only device, supplementing telephonly with a Nokia.
A while later better devices came out, PocketPc was scrapped for Windows Mobile and in high hopes I got a HTC Charmer. This looked like a more solid platform and indeed proper custom ROMa emerged, adding real functionality and allowing to get rid of carrier branded crap, later even RIMs emerged with Windows Mobile version updates never intended for that phone, some even taking the recent cutting edge HTC front-end, the first incarnation of Sense (I think it was called vanilla). I figured the really bad conceptual problems were fixed and merrily went along. But, as god hates my guts, I drained the battery accidentally, only to find that the phone would still go dead, deaf, dumb and wiped despite a good three or four years of technological progress. I was so confident that I neglected backups with that model and basically lost the majority of my stuff again. The Nokia dumbphone was back in the game, the HTC left a dent in the wall that required plaster and a patch of new wallpaper.
TL;DR: The first gen smartphones (PDA with cell module afterthought were such flawed concepts, badly integrated, that keeping recent backups and maintaining it operational took quite an effort on user side, on that sort of negated the higher productivity of using one altogether. But bear with me now, I am still circling around the point or two I want t. Make.
Because a few months after I abandoned smartphones for good (or so I thought) Apple coughed up their iPhone prototype and a few months later pumped it to market. I was amazed (not because of the technological feat, they were more or less throwing R&D money bricks at existing tech and concepts, however they exactly figured out what went wrong in the early generations, fixed that stuff, added fingerdriven multi-touch in favor of stylus driven displays and, this is the real kicker, in a time and age when the cool cell to have was a Nokia 8 Series or a decent, very small flipphone or clamshell they managed to brainwash their customers into what PDA and smartphone adopters at that time already knew - it's totally worth to dump the train of ever smaller telephony only cells for a much larger, more fragile device because of all the freedom and power those things offer you.
I kept my guard and obviously went for Android devices once I got back on the horse. HTC Desire, a backup Wildfire, Desire HD, Sensation, One S and a few tablets along the way. Now, here is the kicker. The Desire ran much better with a custom. The Wildfire could only be updated to a recent Android version with a custom ROM due to HTCs sometimes appalling quick update discontinuation. The Desire HD ran a basically stock custom ROM! But with lots of lovely icon eyecandy, so I stuck with that too. The Sensation benchmarked equally (give or take 5%) but the ROM added novel features, properly implemented, which I decided to stick with. But frankly, it was because I could. I would not have recommended a newbie to Android flashing to take the plunge. My current HTC One S has a recovery downloader and is rooted cause some essential apps I can't live without need it. Full custom ROM switch. I see no point. Android has come a long way. If today I have bloatware I can go to App Manager and disable them. Icon gone, runtime resource hogging gone. Many features that were the selling points for a custom ROM a while back are now natively incorporated.
This is just how I feel about my Sony SGP311 now. It runs 4.2.2 rooted, no recovery yet. This is planned, maybe at some point a stable, close to stock custom kernel to allow some overclocking on a per app basis for XBMC. But other than that it just Danny works. The Sony skin put over stock Androi. Is not that bad, and more to the point it never gave me the impression of hogging the system. Turn off what is useless to you, Office suite, walkway, etc and be on your merry way. It just comes down to what you do with the device, but as a custom ROM junkie who has just gotten off the habit, for me it makes no sense anymore.
Now, if you made it all the way here, I ran two benchmarks on my 4.2.2 root but stock. Maybe they aid you in your decision.
EDIT: the attachments are garbage. Here are proper links:
http://i.imgur.com/vMFEX1p.png
http://i.imgur.com/IEPVvMS.png
http://i.imgur.com/mB5MKSH.png
Also, none of the above is supposed to rain on the developers parade or something. I admire your skills and dedication over all those years, and there isn't a single custom ROM that went onto my devices withour a PayPal "crate of beer" donation ever. However, the fiddling, time spent reading up on custom ROM choice, issues and unlocking process etc is just not in relation for me anymore. Those thoughts are yours to reject, spindle, mutilate, adopt, oppose or plainly ignore... Just speaking for myself here.
Thanks for this! I was also trying to decide if I should be flashing a custom rom on my XTZ. I am itching to flash but couldn't come up with any strong reason to do so, probably for battery life and stock look?
Will be interesting to hear from another person who is a strong believer of flashing custom rom on XTZ.
Sent from my GT-N7105 using Tapatalk
i got slightly better score using a custom rom. Plus i get themes, expanded desktop and pie control which is a must for this tablet. I hope more xda developers develop for this tablet. Will reward with donations
By "better performance" do mean higher benchmark scores? Because any of the 4.3 ROMs I've tried are generally smoother than Sony's 4.2.2.
Spartoi said:
By "better performance" do mean higher benchmark scores? Because any of the 4.3 ROMs I've tried are generally smoother than Sony's 4.2.2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
4.3 too bugy for me
im using 4.2.2 cm rom FXP242-cm-10.1-20131021-UNOFFICIAL-pollux_windy.zip
i already sent team a donation hope to keep em motivated
Spartoi said:
By "better performance" do mean higher benchmark scores? Because any of the 4.3 ROMs I've tried are generally smoother than Sony's 4.2.2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry, the post was incomplete. Changed it.
r1ntse said:
Sorry, the post was incomplete. Changed it.
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Click to collapse
I prefer 4.2 ATM. I get close to 30 Mbps download speed on this ROM where on 4.3 roms only 2mbps download? Also video cam recording, screen is squashed on 4.3. Other than that they run great but I personally cant feel a performqnce boost from 4.3 to 4.2. I also installed crossbreader and Supercharger V6 script which addresses screen redraw lags, so if there is a slower issue with 4.2 i would have addressed it with these two mods and may not be able to tell.
Hi!
I have been a heavy user of custom ROMs for more than three years now on all my Android devices. Lately, although I have a phone that not so long ago was still Samsung's flagship (the galaxy S4, I9505), the pictures I get with it really suck. A couple weeks ago, the phone could not detect my SIM card (pure hardware issue), so I re-installed the stock firmware and took it to the repair shop to get the warranty repair. They fixed it and I got my phone back. Just to make sure it was working fine, I decided to use the stock ROM for a while, and oh surprise: the camera takes much better pics in low light conditions or indoor than the same camera with any custom ROM app (usually AOSP-based, AOKP or CM-based). I tried to download the Google camera, and the low light pictures really suck. Then I tried a bunch of camera apps from the Play store, but I invariably got similar results to what I got with my custom ROMs.
That got me thinking. I'm no dev nor programmer, so I won't get technical, but it seems to me that there can be two reasons for the samsung app to work better:
- Either it has access to (proprietary) hardware drivers that other camera apps cannot access, and therefore it can get everything out of the camera hardware
- Or Samsung (which is not known to be great for its software) has developed a great camera software.
I would think it's something along the lines of the first reason. So does that mean I am either stuck with a ROM I cannot stand (Touchwiz is awful, has always been, and may always be) and a decent camera, or a decent ROM but a camera that is kind of useless when I'm indoor?
If so, how are the cameras on other similar phones (I'm thinking Nexus 5, Sony Xperia, etc.), running on custom ROMs compared to the stock camera apps? Is there also a noticeable difference, or is it just with Samsung?
I understood that you cannot run the Samsung camera apk on a custom ROM (even one on a Samsung phone), because the camera relies on some kind of Samsung proprietary framework.
Does this mean I should be looking for a phone that is running not only on open source software, but also open source hardware, does that even exist?
Anyone has noticed something similar? Am I the only one to be bothered by this?
I'll post here a couple pics taken in the same ambient light conditions. One with the Samsung camera (Auto setting), one with Google camera, and one with another camera app from the market (don't remember which one, but I tested about 15 of them and their results were quite similar).
Anyway, even if you don' have a solution to the problem but can point me to information that could help me understand how to choose my next phone, I would really appreciate. Thanks!
Cheers,
Fa
fabecoool said:
Hi!
I have been a heavy user of custom ROMs for more than three years now on all my Android devices. Lately, although I have a phone that not so long ago was still Samsung's flagship (the galaxy S4, I9505), the pictures I get with it really suck. A couple weeks ago, the phone could not detect my SIM card (pure hardware issue), so I re-installed the stock firmware and took it to the repair shop to get the warranty repair. They fixed it and I got my phone back. Just to make sure it was working fine, I decided to use the stock ROM for a while, and oh surprise: the camera takes much better pics in low light conditions or indoor than the same camera with any custom ROM app (usually AOSP-based, AOKP or CM-based). I tried to download the Google camera, and the low light pictures really suck. Then I tried a bunch of camera apps from the Play store, but I invariably got similar results to what I got with my custom ROMs.
That got me thinking. I'm no dev nor programmer, so I won't get technical, but it seems to me that there can be two reasons for the samsung app to work better:
- Either it has access to (proprietary) hardware drivers that other camera apps cannot access, and therefore it can get everything out of the camera hardware
- Or Samsung (which is not known to be great for its software) has developed a great camera software.
I would think it's something along the lines of the first reason. So does that mean I am either stuck with a ROM I cannot stand (Touchwiz is awful, has always been, and may always be) and a decent camera, or a decent ROM but a camera that is kind of useless when I'm indoor?
If so, how are the cameras on other similar phones (I'm thinking Nexus 5, Sony Xperia, etc.), running on custom ROMs compared to the stock camera apps? Is there also a noticeable difference, or is it just with Samsung?
I understood that you cannot run the Samsung camera apk on a custom ROM (even one on a Samsung phone), because the camera relies on some kind of Samsung proprietary framework.
Does this mean I should be looking for a phone that is running not only on open source software, but also open source hardware, does that even exist?
Anyone has noticed something similar? Am I the only one to be bothered by this?
I'll post here a couple pics taken in the same ambient light conditions. One with the Samsung camera (Auto setting), one with Google camera, and one with another camera app from the market (don't remember which one, but I tested about 15 of them and their results were quite similar).
Anyway, even if you don' have a solution to the problem but can point me to information that could help me understand how to choose my next phone, I would really appreciate. Thanks!
Cheers,
Fa
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So here come the pics. Of course XDA compresses them, but you'll get the idea.
Fa
That is the example difference between things that are built for the device over using open-source options. Software will always be better from the OEM. You see the same thing with HTC and Sony devices. Take the m7 and m8. They have great cameras as long as you use HTC Sense. Other wise all you get is a basic 4 mpx camera that sucks. If you want one that works the same no matter the rom then get a nexus. This is something OEM are doing to make people want to use their software
Thanks @zelendel,
A Nexus could be an option, but the screen size of the Nexus 5 was already too large for me (and so is my current phone, the Galaxy S4), so there's no way I'm getting a Nexus 6 (plus it's prohibitively expensive, at least here in Europe). When will Google make a Nexus mini or compact? That would rock, especially if they go the Sony way (not compromising too much on hardware features). The only downside of Nexus phone is their lack of MicroSD card slot, but that's off topic.
Anyway, what about the Google Edition phones? As I understand, they have the same hardware as their OEM counterpart (don't they?), but instead of running on proprietary stock ROMs, they ship with a pure Vanilla Android. Does this mean they ship with a camera that sucks, or is there some kind of tweak included to get the most of the camera with those editions, too? If so, would flashing that ROM help (if I can get my hands on it)? Unfortunately it seems the whole Google Edition concept has not gained a lot of traction (maybe because of the unavailability of the handsets in many places, maybe thanks to the OEM who did not play fair game and rather managed to get their crappy proprietary stock versions in the hands of customers), so I'm trying not to get too excited about this either.
I guess I will have to go to my local phone shop, spend time there with different devices and see if some of them have less heavily customized skins than TouchWiz. That means I'll no longer go for a Samsung, which have been my only devices so far. The end of an era...
fabecoool said:
Thanks @zelendel,
A Nexus could be an option, but the screen size of the Nexus 5 was already too large for me (and so is my current phone, the Galaxy S4), so there's no way I'm getting a Nexus 6 (plus it's prohibitively expensive, at least here in Europe). When will Google make a Nexus mini or compact? That would rock, especially if they go the Sony way (not compromising too much on hardware features). The only downside of Nexus phone is their lack of MicroSD card slot, but that's off topic.
Anyway, what about the Google Edition phones? As I understand, they have the same hardware as their OEM counterpart (don't they?), but instead of running on proprietary stock ROMs, they ship with a pure Vanilla Android. Does this mean they ship with a camera that sucks, or is there some kind of tweak included to get the most of the camera with those editions, too? If so, would flashing that ROM help (if I can get my hands on it)? Unfortunately it seems the whole Google Edition concept has not gained a lot of traction (maybe because of the unavailability of the handsets in many places, maybe thanks to the OEM who did not play fair game and rather managed to get their crappy proprietary stock versions in the hands of customers), so I'm trying not to get too excited about this either.
I guess I will have to go to my local phone shop, spend time there with different devices and see if some of them have less heavily customized skins than TouchWiz. That means I'll no longer go for a Samsung, which have been my only devices so far. The end of an era...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The GPE device dont come with stock android completely. I have a GPE HTC M7 and the gpe software has some of the closed sourced drivers and such for things like Beats audio and the camera. As I run pure AOSP I wind up with a 4mpx camera that really sucks. While i agree alot of the newer devices have huge screens that make it almost pointless for me. The m7 is not bad at about 5in. But then again it doesnt have an SD card slot but comes with 32gb of storage which I think is plenty for my use. Part of me misses my old samsung devices but I made the mistake once of getting the one with the Samsungs chip and not the snapdragon which killed development.
zelendel said:
The GPE device dont come with stock android completely. I have a GPE HTC M7 and the gpe software has some of the closed sourced drivers and such for things like Beats audio and the camera. As I run pure AOSP I wind up with a 4mpx camera that really sucks. While i agree alot of the newer devices have huge screens that make it almost pointless for me. The m7 is not bad at about 5in. But then again it doesnt have an SD card slot but comes with 32gb of storage which I think is plenty for my use. Part of me misses my old samsung devices but I made the mistake once of getting the one with the Samsungs chip and not the snapdragon which killed development.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Alright! Well, if I could find the GPE edition for my phone (I9505), then I would get all the camera features and none of the TouchWiz crap, which would already be quite an improvement over what I have now (complete TW stock). I guess another possibility would be to flash a stock based ROM that is rooted and from which I could remove all the bloatware...
OK, the hunt is on for a new ROM!
Cheers!
Fa
fabecoool said:
Alright! Well, if I could find the GPE edition for my phone (I9505), then I would get all the camera features and none of the TouchWiz crap, which would already be quite an improvement over what I have now (complete TW stock). I guess another possibility would be to flash a stock based ROM that is rooted and from which I could remove all the bloatware...
OK, the hunt is on for a new ROM!
Cheers!
Fa
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you want all the features of the camera then yes I would run a stock de bloated rom. I used to run Samsung devices and you can remove most things which will give you the camera app which has all the best features.
Hi guys, I'm a jailbroken iPhone 6S+ user. I'm currently a slave to Apple's ecosystem (iPad, Apple TV, Watch but not a Mac) I apologize for the wall of text below, but I know you guys are always glad to give a helping hand.
I've been using iOS since the iPod Touch 2G, taking a break for a couple months only in the Galaxy S3 days, which was my first and only android experience. Many iOS users are in the same boat as me.
Android was a whole different thing back then. Nowadays, when I see the curved, bright and saturated screen of an S7 and how well it pairs with the material design, I feel like I'd love to give that a spin. My problem is that I've been fed constant complaints on behalf of android users, using different handsets and at different times. Here are my main concerns:
I've always heard that, after a "honeymoon" period, almost without fail, all android handsets start to experience stuttering, freezing, rebooting, framerate drops, etc. (maybe one of those at a time, sometimes all of those are common occurrences) does this happen? This is the most important one for me, because if there's something that none of my iPhones ever suffered from, was reduced performance.
Software glitches which are mostly hardware-specific. I've visited the 6P subreddit, only to find a plethora of people complaining about the camera app freezing or crashing, some focus issue I believe as well, or maybe just reduced performance in other parts of the OS (which is the purest form of android). I've also heard that Samsung's bloatware, although only a fraction of what it was back on the S3 days, still causes the phone to feel sluggish at times. Haven't heard about Huawei or HTC bloatware, but I have watched reviews which mentioned some lag here and there.
Software updates. The whole ordeal of having to choose a phone thinking about whether it will get updates in the future or not is pretty sad. I know that Nexus phones are guaranteed to get updates for two years I believe, but as I stated before, visiting the 6P subreddit, I've seen people complain about Google updating the OS but leaving bugs unresolved for several iterations of it. How do you handle this when choosing a phone?
Customization. If there's one area that I've been always convinced Android was leaps and bounds ahead of iOS was this. However, as a jailbroken iOS user, I find that I get most of what you guys can get out the box, but in a prettier package. As in, jb tweaks are very tightly integrated and always match the OS look and feel. In Android, you work with apps or, after rooting, with "modules" I think they're called. How do these differ from JB tweaks (stability-wise as well)? How different is the process of waiting for root vs waiting for a JB? Is rooting as necessary as jailbreaking?
Lastly:
Apps. I am aware of the differences in general app quality when comparing the App Store and the Play Store. Big names such as FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc are mostly the same. But when you start digging a little bit deeper, you find that there's a big difference in not only availability, but also variety and polish. At least, that's how my experience was and what I tend to hear from Android users. How's the Play Store these days? Has this changed a bit?
I apologize once again for the wall of text. If you could answer each point with one or two lines I'd be immensely grateful. Honestly, since these points are big question marks in my head right now, I wouldn't even know what handset to look into, because I don't want to be unpleasantly surprised later on. Android screens though... Damn. Most of them are sexy.
Anyway, thank you very much for your time. Any help is deeply appreciated.
Stuttering/Freezing. You might find this on some low-end devices but the "flagship" devices that I've used haven't suffered from this. This would generally be caused by lower end hardware (lower clocked CPU and lower RAM).
Software glitches. I own the 6P and have never had the camera crash or freeze, never had any software issues with this phone actually. Samsung phones are pretty well known to suffer from being sluggy, this is due to their Touchwiz UI which hogs quite a bit of RAM. The HTC devices I've owned haven't had this issue. Can't speak for Huawei's own UI. The Huawei 6P uses pure Android, I don't notice any real lag issues on this phone.
Updates. If you want guaranteed software updates your best bet is a Nexus. I've noticed no major bugs on the 6P apart from a 4G bug that was specific to an Australian carrier but that was patched pretty quickly. There have been things in Android that people label as bugs that haven't been patched immediately though. Even if you choose a device that may not be updated officially you will very often be able to update via a custom ROM, custom ROMs are often developed for devices long after official support has stopped.
Customization. Android is definitely far ahead in terms of customisation. Most people find customisation via a custom ROM (a customised version of the OS, sometimes based on the stock OS, sometimes based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project or "pure Android"), sometimes based on something like CyanogenMod). A ROM will almost always have extra features and tweaks, these features are usually very well implemented and tie in very nicely with the OS. When speaking about modules you'd be referring to Xposed Modules which are used with the Xposed Framework. Xposed basically opens up a lot of customisation ability, it requires root, it can be used on a stock ROM with root or with a custom ROM. There are a plethora of modules available, too many to even begin to list, the best way to see what they can achieve is to look in our Xposed Modules section. As for root in general, you don't generally need to wait for root like you would with jailbreaking. Having root access is also far more flexible than jailbreaking, you can pretty much do anything with your phone, you have full access to the otherwise blocked system partition. Root methods will vary from device to device but you'll usually need an unlocked bootloader. The easiest devices to root and modify are the Nexus devices, they're designed to be tinkered with, development phones first and foremost.
Apps. In the early days of Android, and even up until a few years ago, the Play Store really lacked in terms of availability and quality. The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in both areas though, there's a wide variety available and the quality has become top notch.
In summing up, it looks like the worries you have are misconceptions commonly held by Apple users.
As a former board level apple technician who used the first ever apple products in kindergarten nearly 30 years ago, I must say I can't even use an iPhone. With all respect, most of your thoughts are not accurate.
Sent from my Nexus 6P using XDA-Developers mobile app
Hi
I was figuring buying a Spark X. I see the Spark series have no entry here, so I wander I had a good idea. Although, following various links here I think I found the man Porridgek3 works on this X model from a somewhat old COS13.0.2 (comparing to COS13.1.4 for others, e.g. Swift series).
Not being a coder myself I can't read the code at github, so I'd like if this is not stupid question/request to read a thread about what are the changes from stock COS13 to the Porridge custom CM13.
Thank you and happy new year to everyboby at XDA.
The Spark devices are pretty poor. They all have Mediatek processors and updates are much slower than for other Wileyfox devices.
flibblesan said:
The Spark devices are pretty poor. They all have Mediatek processors and updates are much slower than for other Wileyfox devices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My aim is not to have a speed daemon. I search something with good and removable battery (Spark X has one and as about same hardware than Spark/Spark+, I guess the autonomy would be better), and I could easily remove the bloatware (stock CN13 would help, I believe, to switch to CMod if exists).
I currently have a Liquid-MT (my first smartphone) for which by chance there was a custom ROM available based on GB-2.3.6, and it was so difficult for me to jailbreak it that I decided to keep it as is until now when mechanical problems with the internal microphone make replacement nearly mandatory.
Also, I'm focused to keep as far away as possible from google and GAFAs I have no confidence in Samsung so I don't even try to know if their devices are easy to make free. That's why I was so happy to discover my target from a single European manufacturer (at least designer) that ships his own with CN, and I easily accept to have a poor camera inside, only 802.11bg and basic 4G. I also know that the Spark X has poor dpi compared to other Sparks because of larger screen, and accept this as a consequence of my decision on battery... an so on...
Not being very much aware in ROMs, I don't know by which tail to catch the beast. I don't really choose for a model, instead I exclude others: GAFA, big Broth, God keeps me away! High end... for tainted kids (or their backward parents), out! Chinese, let's them make phones for ... themselves. So what does remain? Here is my way.
SparkX continued
Hi, how did things go with the sparkx ? I have one here and after no updates for a long time the updates arrived and bumped to nougat and I began to feel like i was signing my life away.
A while back I found an old release of sailfish for my ZTE open C so ive been making steps towards porting sailfish to the sparkx. still in early stages but i am confident it is possible.
1stStep said:
My aim is not to have a speed daemon. I search something with good and removable battery (Spark X has one and as about same hardware than Spark/Spark+, I guess the autonomy would be better), and I could easily remove the bloatware (stock CN13 would help, I believe, to switch to CMod if exists).
I currently have a Liquid-MT (my first smartphone) for which by chance there was a custom ROM available based on GB-2.3.6, and it was so difficult for me to jailbreak it that I decided to keep it as is until now when mechanical problems with the internal microphone make replacement nearly mandatory.
Also, I'm focused to keep as far away as possible from google and GAFAs I have no confidence in Samsung so I don't even try to know if their devices are easy to make free. That's why I was so happy to discover my target from a single European manufacturer (at least designer) that ships his own with CN, and I easily accept to have a poor camera inside, only 802.11bg and basic 4G. I also know that the Spark X has poor dpi compared to other Sparks because of larger screen, and accept this as a consequence of my decision on battery... an so on...
Not being very much aware in ROMs, I don't know by which tail to catch the beast. I don't really choose for a model, instead I exclude others: GAFA, big Broth, God keeps me away! High end... for tainted kids (or their backward parents), out! Chinese, let's them make phones for ... themselves. So what does remain? Here is my way.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Out of all of the devices out there that support LineageOS, the Z5 Compact looks the most appealing to me, because of the good audio quality, nice design/build, and reasonable size.
But is it foolish to purchase a Z5C with the intention of using it to run a custom ROMs?
Are people here using custom ROMs purely as a stopgap until they can get a newer phone that supports Oreo? I don't need or want the latest, greatest hardware, but ever since buying my first smartphone (a Nexus) I've become accustomed to using the latest software. Is the Z5 Compact a dead end in that regard? Or is it likely that I'll be using Android P and Q on this device in the next couple of years?
"But Strobelite, if you're worried about being able to use the latest version of Android, why don't you just get something by Motorola? Those have a healthy, active developer community. Or, you could just be a normal person, and buy a new phone."
If it runs GApps, I won't use it
Audio quality is important to me
The Motorola phones are ugly, in my opinion
Hi, since a few weeks I'm running on LineageOS 14.1 with my z5 Compact and I don't miss the stock rom at all. I didn't test all features yet (e.g. MHL), but I'm very satisfied until now. It's stable (didn't encounter any random reboot), fast and battery life is ok for me (I use Amplify and Greenify with xposed).
I only can recommend this and if you want to run without GApps, this is the way to go. I'm using Yalp store and it's even faster updating my apps than the original Play store.
Phone has FM Radio, SD card slot, fast and accurate GPS and enough power (LOS doesn't seem to run as hot as the stock rom (you can choose between performance profiles), so it's another plus for me).
Just try it and see if it works for you.
The only thing that annoyed me is the camera, the quality is just bad and sometimes it doesn't focus (or too late)
If you dont miss the camera then yes.
Strobelite said:
But is it foolish to purchase a Z5C with the intention of using it to run a custom ROMs?
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I can understand your problem but of course it is imo.
Z5 line has never been widely supported by developers and the Compact is the one with less roms now. You can imagine what kind of future it would have.
Luckily in the past we had great guys who made stock rom root/mods/DRM restoration but the AOSP scene is completely different. As always you lose some features with non-stock roms, usually Camera quality (because you lose closed source vendor optimizations/software) and minor ones.
There will be probably 1 or 2 roms for future android versions (thanks to projects like SLim rom, PAC, Resurrection,...) but there are already few mantainers, especially for the Z5c, and some aosp roms are also unofficially maintained by one person...
Sony lost people (and developers) appeal after the Z3 line and this gets reflected in custom rom support for the newer Xperia lines. If you really want the latest OS on your phone for the next 4 years you should go for something else imo.
Z5c is still great device, refined materials and with good battery but don't expect a forum support like Samsungs, Huaweis,... Unfortunately the old days where flagship phones were < 4,5" are gone.
Maybe you already know it but GSMarena has a great phone-finder search engine which can help you refine your search for compact products.