Hey Everyone! This is the ultimate guide to running the Galaxy A5 of 2014 or better known as the SM-A500F, as a daily driver and hopefully its noob friendly enough. All links included below.
Story Time:
I currently daily drive a Galaxy S10 and it has never really ever let me down, that was until I dropped it and the screen fractured. Due to backlog at the Samsung Service Center, they said that it would be approximately a month and a half before the phone would be fully repaired. As such, I was stuck with the Galaxy A5 that I had bought maybe 6-7 years ago at this point, which I hadn't touched in years, as my only phone, and with a large chunk of money going towards fixing the shattered display of the S10, it was apparent that I was going to be stuck with this old, Snapdragon 410, 64bit CPU but 32bit locked bootloader, phone. This lead to a huge dilemna. There was no way on earth that I was gonna use stock on this phone, because although the stock firmware ran alright, it left a lot to be desired. And hence, began the conquest to find the ultimate ROM for the A5, which involved diving through many many threads, even more ROMs. In the last month and a half, I have gone through approximately, 14-15 ROMs, from various developers such as Srkndennis, a couple of Soft-Bullet ROMS (The ones that were still up anyways), and some Samsung Expereince Ports by Corsicanu and some Deadsquirrel ROMs. With an average time of a day each, I have come to a conclusion, on what are the definitive daily driver ROMs for this aging device.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion. This entire threads description on what the two best ROMs for this device, are purely based on my use case scenarios, and how I utilized it. Your mileage can and will vary and your devices performance will also vary. I have just selected, which again in my opinion, is the best possible ROM for this device, and for my use case scenario.
Pre-requisites:
Latest Stock Firmware:
https://samfw.com/firmware/SM-A500F/XSG - You'll want to be on the latest possible firmware and bootloader to begin modifiying and flashing different ROMs.
Recovery:
Now this is a bit more complicated. There have been many recoveries released for the a500f over the years, with various improvements. The best one I've found however is ashyx's recovery, which is one of the few, if not the only recovery that supports MTP. The only other recovery that you would need is if you plan to use the a5 with f2fs ROMs.
Ashyx Recovery: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/...ung-galaxy-a5-2015-sm-a500f-fu-g-h-m.3360802/
Deadsquirrel's F2FS Recovery: https://androidfilehost.com/?fid=817550096634793304 (Note: Not all ROMs support F2FS, and on the ROMs that did, I had to modify the installer script).
Odin 10.6:
Well, you need this to flash recoveries in the first place, so its essential.
Link: https://odindownload.com/download/Odin3_v3.10.6.zip
Magisk:
This is needed for root access as well as to pass safetynet. I used primarily the canary builds, as they have the highest pass rate, but this is preference.
Link: https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk - Just scroll down and you'll see various versions that say "Magisk", "Magisk Beta" and "Magisk Canary". Select whichever you prefer.
Samsung USB Drivers:
Samsung Android USB Driver | Samsung Developers
You need the driver only if you are developing on Windows and want to connect a Samsung Android device to your development environment over USB.
developer.samsung.com
Key Note: Remember that downloading will give you an apk. To get the installer, just rename "Magisk.apk" to "Magisk.zip".
Gapps:
This is essentially for Google Apps. This should never be flashed on ROMs that already have GAPPS such as Samsung Experience ROMs and Pixel Experience ROMs. Honestly, I would refer to the Lineage OS Gapps Guide. They tell you which Gapps work best with stock android ROMs. Just remember, to choose the lightest package always, unless you absolutely need something else from the other packages, since this little a5 only has 2 GB of available RAM, and Google Apps can very easily eat through that. In the case of Open Gapps for example, pick pico.
Link: https://wiki.lineageos.org/gapps
Thats about it for the pre-requisites. Its now time to get to the actual problem.
The problem with a device this old, and this underpowered:
The hardware of this device does leave a lot to be desired, in basically all areas, except build quality. It is a strange feeling to hold a phone with a metal unibody, but thats where the plus sides end. This phone is quite severally underpowered. The Snapdragon 410 in this device was weak when it launched, and is still very weak by today's standards. It scores 85 on the single core of Geekbench, and 305 on its multicore, which is quite staggeringly low. On top of this, Samsung have done something quite silly with this phone's bootloader and locked it to 32bit, for a 64bit processor. While this means that apps can never run on 64bit mode, it does mean we achieve slight memory savings at the very least. On the topic of memory, this phone has 2GB, which wouldn't be so bad, if it just wasn't really slow, as well as really old. Its storage isn't much to write home about, being quite slow as well. All in all this means that the ultimate ROM for the A500F, would have to be light on memory, be quite optimized in terms of applications installed, and have a good kernel/drivers. Heavy ROMs can run on this device, but it is upto you whether or not, you want to deal with the repercussions of being constantly low on memory, and the additional CPU cycles needed to run the additional bloat.
The Trifecta:
Well, at the very least, there is some good news. We have 3 potential daily driver ROMs, after extensively testing every ROM, XDA has to offer. These ROMs in my opinion, perform the best in terms of sheer performance, battery life and just overall usability.
1. A8 2018 Port by Prototype74:
This may come as a surprise to most of you, but yes, if Samsung Experience is something that cannot be lived without, then this ROM does it all. Not only does it offer all the glorious features that Samsung ROMs offer, it still offers quite decent performance with great camera performance to go with it. The built in Samsung Theme engine works, so this means it is possible to theme the device to give it, its own dark mode, after selecting an amoled theme, which is great for a daily driver. There are a couple of downsides which I will list down below, but this ROM by far, is the best performing Samsung Experience ROM out of all of them. However, do remember I did this testing, by selecting the lightest possible bloatware selection, but still keeping the theme engine alive.
+ Positives:
- All the Samsung Features you'll ever need
- Debloatable Installer
- The best functioning camera out of all three ROMs
-Great Idle and Standby time and overall decent battery life
/ Negatives:
- RAM Management - Obviously with the amount of features of a Samsung Experience ROM, RAM suffers. This ROM manages it well, but it is still noticeable, with apps left in memory too long closing, and overall sluggish performance the more apps that are opened.
- Performance - Now I did state that performance is great for a Samsung Experience ROM, but this is excluding the next two options. In comparison, this ROM can suffer at times from stutters, app load times, scroll jitter and overall lag sometimes. The reason I've recommended this ROM is because it is genuinely few and far between, and performs the same, if not better stock most of the time.
Link: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/...1-1-v6-0-seperience-rom-a8-2018-port.3754851/
- Side Note: To keep the theme engine alive, you will need to keep installed, Samsung Account and Samsung Themes itself. It also important that "Gameoptimizer" service is deselected as it has been proven to ruin performance than actually improve it, and I'm not just referring to games.
2. Srkndennis's SlimROM Android 7.1.2:
Well, its in the name. SlimROM is famed for being light, incredibly light, and this takes the equation of speed to a whole new tier. The ROM in itself is from the ground up, built to meet one goal, light. It is incredibly fast, incredibly memory efficient, and almost everything benefits from it. Now this being stock android, there are a lot of "Samsung" comfort features that just won't be there, but honestly, the pefromance and battery gained from just running something light, is immeasurable.
+ Positives:
- Stellar Performance, best out of all three
- Stellar Battery and Standby, again the best out of all three
- Lightest of the bunch, and holds the most amount of apps in memory
/ Negatives:
- Lacks some features and customization found in other ROMs such as Lineage OS and Resurrection Remix:
Link: https://mega.nz/folder/7s0CnQpL#OpPDOEsGA5APizajXRZ32A/folder/v4Ug3YLD
Other ROMs, especially those on higher android versions:
After heavy experimenting on ROMs of newer android versions, it is apparent that the A5 peaks, at Android 7.1.2. Any android version after this, while not having any hardware issues necessarily, will just not function anywhere near as quick, nor as responsive. The only firmware that even gets remotely close to being partially usable is srkndennis's Android 10. When I state usable, I mean in term's of UI switching, application performance and overall speed with battery efficiency. This is NOT
because the ROMs aren't made well, this is genuinely just the limitation of the hardware on the A5. Remember that this device can barely run most basic apps, due to the bare minimum requirements of these apps slowly increasing due to the addition of more modern features.
That being said, this little device can still function, and quite well at that too. You just need to select the right firmware for it. It's Magnus Opus.
Installation guide for any of the ROM's listed here today:
1. If stock start from the top, if not go from step f.
a. Power down the A5, and once it has shut down, hold the volume down, power button and home button simultaneously.
b. Once the warning show up, press volume up, and enter download mode. Once this is done, plug your phone into your laptop.
c. Open the Odin zip, and extract it into a new folder. Once this is done, run the setup for Samsung USB Drivers and let it install.
d. Once that is done, open Odin, and in AP select the needed recovery. Ensure that the recovery image you downloaded is in a .tar zip file and the recovery image inside that .tar file is renamed recovery.img
e. Once it is selected, start the flash, and wait till the program finishes. Right when the screen goes blank on the phone, quickly hold the volume up, home and power button simultaneously till recovery boots.
f. Now that twrp is booted, click on wipe, and select, system, data, dalvik cache and cache.
g. Once the wipe is complete, copy over Magisk, the ROM you require and the GAPPs (if needed).
h. First select the ROM and install it. Then Gapps (if required. it is not recommended on Samsung Touchwiz ROMs). Then finally, install Magisk.
i. Click on reboot system, and that's it, you've installed your ROM. Just wait for the device to boot now.
Thanks for reading, hope ya'll have a good day!
Related
I have Samsung drivers
atlas 2.2
odin 1.3
gbbootloaders
cmw4 fixed for cm7
CI500_VZW_EH03_GB_CM
and mutliple releases of CM10.1
I followed instructions exactly how [GUIDE] Installing a Rom/CWM recovery/Root or going back to Stock say to do.
I always end up with a bootloop after flashing. The instructions are flawed. Or, one or more files are corrupted.
fewert said:
I have Samsung drivers
atlas 2.2
odin 1.3
gbbootloaders
cmw4 fixed for cm7
CI500_VZW_EH03_GB_CM
and mutliple releases of CM10.1
I followed instructions exactly how [GUIDE] Installing a Rom/CWM recovery/Root or going back to Stock say to do.
I always end up with a bootloop after flashing. The instructions are flawed. Or, one or more files are corrupted.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you look at my post which further explains the process.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53235945
Have you installed cm10.1 multiple times?
Some times it doesn't always set thing up in one flash
hhp_211 said:
Did you look at my post which further explains the process.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=53235945
Have you installed cm10.1 multiple times?
Some times it doesn't always set thing up in one flash
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah I read a post saying to do what you just described with success.
However, this phone is really poor. I have tried GB, ICS, JB and all of them I get similar performance just different features.
The phone can't handle two apps at once regardless of the rom.
I was traveling to a different city to get something on Craigs. It constantly would shutdown my Maps and Navigation when I wanted to read a Kik message.
If I have Kik open and want to read a txt msg, it takes like 10 seconds after clicking the txt msg icon to show the txt.
Is there an app or method that everyone uses on this phone that I don't know about to get this phone to run speedy? Or, is it just so outdated it can't run modern versions of apps?
I just want navigation, txt, kik, and a light browser like dolphin.
Can a Fascinate handle all that and be snappy and quick??
In the mean time, I am switching over to my S3, though I don't like how it's so big I can't reach all the screen with one hand.
fewert said:
Yeah I read a post saying to do what you just described with success.
However, this phone is really poor. I have tried GB, ICS, JB and all of them I get similar performance just different features.
The phone can't handle two apps at once regardless of the rom.
I was traveling to a different city to get something on Craigs. It constantly would shutdown my Maps and Navigation when I wanted to read a Kik message.
If I have Kik open and want to read a txt msg, it takes like 10 seconds after clicking the txt msg icon to show the txt.
Is there an app or method that everyone uses on this phone that I don't know about to get this phone to run speedy? Or, is it just so outdated it can't run modern versions of apps?
I just want navigation, txt, kik, and a light browser like dolphin.
Can a Fascinate handle all that and be snappy and quick??
In the mean time, I am switching over to my S3, though I don't like how it's so big I can't reach all the screen with one hand.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i think you should understand that this phone has a single-core CPU. running at 1GHz. this phone is almost 4 years old. it's amazing this thing can even run things like Kitkat at all, let alone with the relative finesse the most recent unjust build provides.
it took me a while to realize that apps these days are not optimized for single-core CPUs, it took upgrading to a gs4 to realize that. the fascinate is an admittedly, well, slow phone. or its not meant for multitasking, definitely.
the s3 runs circles around this phone. almost anything does. i've never really found anything that allows for the multitasking and insane speed that i get out of my s4, the closest i've ever gotten was cm7, but that even in its stable release had tons of SOD problems (sleep of death, phone locks and never comes back on).
part of the issue is that the fascinate has 512MB of RAM. back in 2010, it was adequate. not even good, just.. alright. these days the norm is 2GB. a phone with 1GB of RAM is considered outdated. despite google's efforts to optimize kitkat for 512MB devices, this phone's GPU shares RAM with the system, and depending on the configuration, usually 100+ MB is reserved for the GPU, leaving typically about 360-384MB of RAM. You can get more (the kitkat ROM i've mentioned allows 416MB of RAM to the system) but things will start breaking, particularly HD video recording and torch, among other things
skepticmisfit said:
i think you should understand that this phone has a single-core CPU. running at 1GHz. this phone is almost 4 years old. it's amazing this thing can even run things like Kitkat at all, let alone with the relative finesse the most recent unjust build provides.
it took me a while to realize that apps these days are not optimized for single-core CPUs, it took upgrading to a gs4 to realize that. the fascinate is an admittedly, well, slow phone. or its not meant for multitasking, definitely.
the s3 runs circles around this phone. almost anything does. i've never really found anything that allows for the multitasking and insane speed that i get out of my s4, the closest i've ever gotten was cm7, but that even in its stable release had tons of SOD problems (sleep of death, phone locks and never comes back on).
part of the issue is that the fascinate has 512MB of RAM. back in 2010, it was adequate. not even good, just.. alright. these days the norm is 2GB. a phone with 1GB of RAM is considered outdated. despite google's efforts to optimize kitkat for 512MB devices, this phone's GPU shares RAM with the system, and depending on the configuration, usually 100+ MB is reserved for the GPU, leaving typically about 360-384MB of RAM. You can get more (the kitkat ROM i've mentioned allows 416MB of RAM to the system) but things will start breaking, particularly HD video recording and torch, among other things
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol my phone e400 is super multitasker
Sent from my LG-E400 using XDA Free mobile app
fewert said:
Yeah I read a post saying to do what you just described with success.
However, this phone is really poor. I have tried GB, ICS, JB and all of them I get similar performance just different features.
The phone can't handle two apps at once regardless of the rom.
I was traveling to a different city to get something on Craigs. It constantly would shutdown my Maps and Navigation when I wanted to read a Kik message.
If I have Kik open and want to read a txt msg, it takes like 10 seconds after clicking the txt msg icon to show the txt.
Is there an app or method that everyone uses on this phone that I don't know about to get this phone to run speedy? Or, is it just so outdated it can't run modern versions of apps?
I just want navigation, txt, kik, and a light browser like dolphin.
Can a Fascinate handle all that and be snappy and quick??
In the mean time, I am switching over to my S3, though I don't like how it's so big I can't reach all the screen with one hand.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
skepticmisfit said:
i think you should understand that this phone has a single-core CPU. running at 1GHz. this phone is almost 4 years old. it's amazing this thing can even run things like Kitkat at all, let alone with the relative finesse the most recent unjust build provides.
it took me a while to realize that apps these days are not optimized for single-core CPUs, it took upgrading to a gs4 to realize that. the fascinate is an admittedly, well, slow phone. or its not meant for multitasking, definitely.
the s3 runs circles around this phone. almost anything does. i've never really found anything that allows for the multitasking and insane speed that i get out of my s4, the closest i've ever gotten was cm7, but that even in its stable release had tons of SOD problems (sleep of death, phone locks and never comes back on).
part of the issue is that the fascinate has 512MB of RAM. back in 2010, it was adequate. not even good, just.. alright. these days the norm is 2GB. a phone with 1GB of RAM is considered outdated. despite google's efforts to optimize kitkat for 512MB devices, this phone's GPU shares RAM with the system, and depending on the configuration, usually 100+ MB is reserved for the GPU, leaving typically about 360-384MB of RAM. You can get more (the kitkat ROM i've mentioned allows 416MB of RAM to the system) but things will start breaking, particularly HD video recording and torch, among other things
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have not used the kik so I can't really say about it's performance,,, I have seen on the 4.4 kitkat rom from Unjust when I have used google maps navigation it was a huge battery sucker, no matter if I only put it on device [gps] only. I could barely even use it and on a charge it was still draining it faster than it could take it.
i did not have this on jellybean roms
I have not had the the problems you describe '10 seconds to open an app'.
Hangouts used to be slow opening initially but their latest update has made it much faster
I don't think it's multitasking is bad for what it is as a phone given it's specs,,, but everyone use a phone differently,,,
so I mostly agree with the overall jest of what skept is saying,,, it is ultimately limited by the 512MB ram available to use.
for GB and JB roms you can also look at the V6 Supercharger thread, it does help with multi-tasking, it can be a bit hard to understand how to implement it but once you figure that out it goes decent, boot up and time till initial use are much longer than normal, but you just have to plan your reboots for when plenty of time allows
i think jellybean roms are very good performers and given the face that you can use a different kernel that allows for overclocking up 1400 Mhz if desired,,, it's a give and take though,,,, over 1200Mhz and battery life goes south very quickly. [luckily the battery doesn't take long to charge, usually 1 hour,,, and even 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there will really help it last through the day]
Most of the earlier jellybean [4.1.x] versions seemed to give better battery life from what I remember than the newer [4.2.x] ones
and there are a lot of different ones to choose from to suite your style or needs from basic cm to full customization.
most of them were stable enough to be daily drivers,,, the big thing is you will just have to read up on a particular one or just break down and try some to see if they fit what you want.
With all that said though the fascinate will never perform like an S3, S4, Nexus, Nexus 4, Moto G, Moto X
I would consider checking out the Motorola Moto G, it's physical dimensions are nearly she same as the fassy but a hugely better phone, screen size, etc and depending on your phone carrier needs it can be had for as little as $65 bucks...
Well lg optimus l3 is very powerful and performant in fact of multitasking if you're a dev or not a complete noob.My phone can go until 1.2 ghz without probs and its factory clock speed was 800 mhz.Most apps aren't optimized for multi-cores and l3 is single core.384 mb of ram are enough on stock and 301 mb aren't enough on cm.But my kernels got swap.
Battery is very good:10days in stand by,2 days in normal use.
Antutu sucks but i don't believe in it.
So its up to the devs,we're good devs and there are more than 100000 l3s in the world.Now we're getting dualboot.Its all about devs,its all about devs.
Sent from my LG-E400 using XDA Free mobile app
Is it just me, or does the phone use a lot of RAM? Mine seems to be using 2.7GB minimum at all times. Seems high.
Higher would be more ideal. The Windows mindset of "I'm running out of RAM!" doesn't get you anywhere here; in Android, empty RAM is wasted RAM. My Droid Turbo averages ~1.8gb used of 3gb. Seems Nougat tries to average 60%-70% usage.
When you switch out of an app, it's moved to the background and (usually) suspended, but kept in memory so you can switch back to it quickly. It's things like this that take up memory you think should be "free".
In the event that you need to load up a big app, stuff running in the background is quickly and gracefully unloaded.
Unless you're getting constant foreground app crashes - which might indicate that something is forcefully keeping itself loaded and starving everything else of needed memory - you shouldn't worry about it. Android is fairly good at handling memory these days.
Septfox said:
Higher would be more ideal. The Windows mindset of "I'm running out of RAM!" doesn't get you anywhere here; in Android, empty RAM is wasted RAM. My Droid Turbo averages ~1.8gb used of 3gb. Seems Nougat tries to average 60%-70% usage.
When you switch out of an app, it's moved to the background and (usually) suspended, but kept in memory so you can switch back to it quickly. It's things like this that take up memory you think should be "free".
In the event that you need to load up a big app, stuff running in the background is quickly and gracefully unloaded.
Unless you're getting constant foreground app crashes - which might indicate that something is forcefully keeping itself loaded and starving everything else of needed memory - you shouldn't worry about it. Android is fairly good at handling memory these days.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I notice this issue more on custom ROMs than stock firmware. On mine and my wife's Quarks (3GB RAM, as you well know), running Marshmallow and Lollipop versions of the same ROM, something causes the phones to just freeze up for about a minute, crashes, then RAM is released to use. It was happening at least once a day on my phone, then my wife said it was happening to her phone. (Our old phones, not the new LG V30 phones.) I've messed with the LMK settings, trying different combinations, to no avail. And I did report it in the Nougat ROM thread for that phone. (Marshmallow ROM thread no longer has support.)
So, while I totally agree with your answer, it is the technically correct answer, I do understand the OP's concern. I've gotten to the point where I like to see more free RAM, so I know my phone isn't about to freeze up. At least on my old phone.
I love custom ROMs, but the past couple of weeks it's been nice to run stock on my new LG V30 and have a very fluid experience. I've not disabled anything. I saw some others disable stuff and then got lagging. I've not touched a thing and my phone is very smooth.
Could a "theme" downloaded from play store take up a lot of RAM and/or slow things down, too?
This is my first experience with a theme.
coldbeverage said:
Could a "theme" downloaded from play store take up a lot of RAM and/or slow things down, too?
This is my first experience with a theme.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Possibly, but probably not. From what I've seen, LG themes seem to skin far less than say, substratum does, and even substratum is pretty lightweight unless you get into transparent themes.
Keep in mind the default theme is itself...well, a theme. You're not really saving anything by staying on it. If you see a skin you like, use it, if you're really worried use one of the LG-provided ones that come with the phone.
ChazzMatt said:
I notice this issue more on custom ROMs than stock firmware. On mine and my wife's Quarks (3GB RAM, as you well know), running Marshmallow and Lollipop versions of the same ROM, something causes the phones to just freeze up for about a minute, crashes, then RAM is released to use. It was happening at least once a day on my phone, then my wife said it was happening to her phone. (Our old phones, not the new LG V30 phones.) I've messed with the LMK settings, trying different combinations, to no avail. And I did report it in the Nougat ROM thread for that phone. (Marshmallow ROM thread no longer has support.)
So, while I totally agree with your answer, it is the technically correct answer, I do understand the OP's concern. I've gotten to the point where I like to see more free RAM, so I know my phone isn't about to freeze up. At least on my old phone.
I love custom ROMs, but the past couple of weeks it's been nice to run stock on my new LG V30 and have a very fluid experience. I've not disabled anything. I saw some others disable stuff and then got lagging. I've not touched a thing and my phone is very smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Interesting. It does seem like stock ROMs tend to be more conservative with RAM usage, whereas custom ROMs will have less aggressive minfree settings in order to keep more stuff loaded up. "Unused RAM is wasted RAM", but only up to a certain point; in my experience (Maserati with its ancient kernel as well as Quark) approaching ~100mb of free memory in LP/MM/N can bring things to a crawl, and pushing it can cause a kernel panic :good:
The only issue I've seen in Quark RR has been with the Pixiv app, though, and it does exactly what you said. But...I'm fairly certain the app itself leaks memory, as it only happens after browsing a while and is perfectly fine for another stretch after it OOMs and restarts.
My experience with stock ROMs in the past - Quark included - has been "smooth but lacking in features/customization" --- I've never really understood the complaints that stock is slow and claims that custom is blazing fast in comparison. The OEM has a decided advantage in that they have all the tools they need to compile the ROM properly, with then-current driver and kernel sources and a deep understanding of the hardware...I'd be really surprised to find a stock ROM from the last few years to be slower than custom.
But to be honest, my sample size is pretty small. *shrugs* I stick by what I've said, though, if anything the V30 doesn't use its memory enough; some people have complained about apps popping out of memory sooner than expected. LG is still putting out updates too, if a memory-management problem is found, hopefully they'll get right on fixing it.
What's your way to make your device be truly yours?
Me personally,
I am a power user and i don't really care about battery life much (1.5 days of battery life is enough for me), and i love to try out custom roms. I always loved the look and feel of pixel devices, especially the product sans font.
So my way of setting up my device is to install a font pack and a custom kernel.
I had mostly used the AOSCP Rom since it first came out, but recently the Liquid Remix rom is being my daily driver.
So my way to flash things is-
Liquid remix rom>Product sans font>Stormguard kernel
That does my job. and later on i install some apps like modded google cam and pixel 2 launcher and the Viper module from magisk for my sound mod..
So at the end of the day i have a device with super stock pixel look and full of raw performance.:victory:
But whats your way of doing things? Do you love stock miui or run a customised version of it? or are you a part of the modding community?
I like a balanced phone. Neither biased towards RAW performance nor too power saving.
What I find is you can increase performance and decrease battery consumption at the same time when you minimise the amount of automation in your system. Say for example an auto sync service which requires it own service to be running in the background, it's not much savings but when a considerable number of automations are reduced your phone might run smooth even on the powersave governor. I analyse evey automated process be it kernel related like Touch boost, a system automation like updates checking, an app automation like google sync and see if it is really necessary for me. Only the once I use and need get to run.
This is mostly why I root my phone in the first place. I want my phone's power where and when I need it. But never do I compromise on performance too, after all we're in the 21st century.
I use a well stable custom ROM( which most of times happens to be Lineage) topped with a well balanced kernel and of course Magisk. Once booted there's a lot of stuff I do to achieve that butter smooth power friendly UI.
I was wondering if given the fact this phone was released with Android 10 and all custom ROM seem to be built from this I have also seen Android 11 build, and I wonder if it would be possible to compile a build of Android 9.0 Pie that would work well with the Moto G Power?
Or is there some kind of difference between the drivers and sources provided by Motorola to make this possible, if not what are the barriers to accomplishing this?
The reason I would like a 9 based ROM for my phone is it seems to have all the features I want and uses a lot less memory than Android 10.
I had a Moto G7 Power before this and it had 3gb of ram and ran Pie, the free memory I had to use for opening games and apps is about the same amount I have on my new 4gb device running Android 10. I also noticed the increase while testing an Android 10 based ROM on the G7 Power a while ago.
"free" RAM doesn't mean much. It certainly isn't a good indication of actual performance.
If you have RAM that's just sitting around unused then it's pretty much just wasted until you do something that's gonna use it.
The OS caches anything it can to help you have a smoother system with faster loading times. Any modern OS does that, and Android is no exception. I'm not sure if this changed in between android 9 and 10 tho, but I know there's a **** ton of nitty gritty settings and parameters for the cache behavior so that is possible, but it's pretty much reserved for the guy that makes the ROM.
have you tried lineageos on it yet? I use crdroid myself, which was my daily driver ROM back on my lg g3 lol. It feels pretty much just like home for me
dandu3 said:
"free" RAM doesn't mean much. It certainly isn't a good indication of actual performance.
If you have RAM that's just sitting around unused then it's pretty much just wasted until you do something that's gonna use it.
The OS caches anything it can to help you have a smoother system with faster loading times. Any modern OS does that, and Android is no exception. I'm not sure if this changed in between android 9 and 10 tho, but I know there's a **** ton of nitty gritty settings and parameters for the cache behavior so that is possible, but it's pretty much reserved for the guy that makes the ROM.
have you tried lineageos on it yet? I use crdroid myself, which was my daily driver ROM back on my lg g3 lol. It feels pretty much just like home for me
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I understand that, but even still with 1 GB additional in my upgrade I should be able to switch between a game and an app or two more than before, but they still close even when set to disable battery optimzation off, the real world usage suggests there is less available ram and more taken up by the system.
Also does anyone have an answer to the actual question i am curious?
I recently went from a oneplus 5 to the nord 200 when I switched to t-mobile because of the free promotion. Before I got it I did a little bit of research on the processor and storage speed and didn't expect much of a difference in performance because the snapdragon 480 seems to be fairly powerful and the nord has the same UFS 2.1 storage as my old phone.
I was pretty disappointed to find in my use the phone about 1/2 the time the phone was pretty sluggish in the general user experience and app launch times were significantly longer. May be placebo, but I disabled digital wellbeing, and all the tmobile bloatware and it may have helped a little. I remember reading oneplus heavily throttled some of their phones in recent history. I may switch back to my old phone.
I know the device is relatively new, do you guys think it will get better with software updates or is this just how it is?
I found turning on "Mobile data always active" in the developer options massively improved performance in my apps (at least where online load times and download speeds in-game were concerned)
Did you just get your phone recently? After setting up this phone for the first time, I also noticed the device was extremely slow, with all the app and software updates happening in the background. After all the updates were installed, I turned the phone off for about a day, and performance went to normal. It's not as fast as a flagship and there are minor hiccups here and there, but that's about what I expected from a 400 series SoC.
My original report was the day after I set everything up, I disabled the permissions for the launcher which did improve the responsiveness of the launcher, but application performance and launch times are still slow compared to my old device and not what I would expect from a phone of this spec.
I'm pretty confident this phone is a victim of oneplus' recently reported throttling for battery life. I was curious and compared geekbench scores (which aren't throttled under oneplus' list) and both the nord and my oneplus 5 got fairly similar scores for both cpu and compute. I tried out a browser benchmark motionmark which benches graphics performance. The nord got a 25 and the oneplus 5 got a 189... I ran the test again to make sure but got similar results.
That graphics should be coming from gpu and not cpu though....
I tested cpu and compute on geekbench, compute is a measure of gpu performance. The nord scored a little higher than the 5 in that.
I would assume oneplus' throttling would effect cpu and gpu but even if not, my oneplus 5 scoring almost 8x as high does not seem anywhere near normal
T1Coreon said:
I recently went from a oneplus 5 to the nord 200 when I switched to t-mobile because of the free promotion. Before I got it I did a little bit of research on the processor and storage speed and didn't expect much of a difference in performance because the snapdragon 480 seems to be fairly powerful and the nord has the same UFS 2.1 storage as my old phone.
I was pretty disappointed to find in my use the phone about 1/2 the time the phone was pretty sluggish in the general user experience and app launch times were significantly longer. May be placebo, but I disabled digital wellbeing, and all the tmobile bloatware and it may have helped a little. I remember reading oneplus heavily throttled some of their phones in recent history. I may switch back to my old phone.
I know the device is relatively new, do you guys think it will get better with software updates or is this just how it is?
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Click to collapse
Same experience here, i picked up this phone expecting at least a decent experience but still get bad slow not usable for everyday tasks sometimes.
Im not expecting a flagship performance of course but this is far from decent in my experience.
I hope android 12 will solve many performance issues. Or custom fw
I'm about to throw away this phone into trash. Did not expect so weak dev community activity. The laggy interface is almost unusable if you constantly swap between apps and find them unloaded from RAM. All my text or uploaded content just disappear. It is very frustrating experience. I never had this behaviour with my 2/32 gb xiaomi.
zaooza said:
I'm about to throw away this phone into trash. The laggy interface is almost unusable if you constantly swap between apps and find them unloaded from RAM. All my text or uploaded content just disappear. It is very frustrating experience. I never had this behaviour with my 2/32 gb xiaomi.
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If you're really at your wit's end, have you considered installing a GSI? I've tried Phh's AOSP w/ gapps, and once you register your device with Google, it works flawlessly (except safetynet/drm) and is a million times faster than stock. Or I'd be more than happy to take your device off your hands.
zaooza said:
Did not expect so weak dev community activity.
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You know, custom ROMs don't just appear out of thin air. Someone has to take the time to bring up a device and make it stable, and it's not an easy task. I would say to be patient and just accept the fact that there's no guarantee that this device will get custom ROMs.
lzgmc said:
If you're really at your wit's end, have you considered installing a GSI? I've tried Phh's AOSP w/ gapps, and once you register your device with Google, it works flawlessly (except safetynet/drm) and is a million times faster than stock. Or I'd be more than happy to take your device off your hands.
You know, custom ROMs don't just appear out of thin air. Someone has to take the time to bring up a device and make it stable, and it's not an easy task. I would say to be patient and just accept the fact that there's no guarantee that this device will get custom ROMs.
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Any disadvantages with gsi besides safety net drm? Want to try gsi but this is new to me
Metconnect2000 said:
Any disadvantages with gsi besides safety net drm? Want to try gsi but this is new to me
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Other than pictures from the camera being degraded compared to stock and having to install apps from the Play Store/changing a few settings in the Settings app, everything seems to work fine