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Hi all,
I am gearing up to get a Nexus 4 in a couple of weeks following its price drop, and I think I'd like to install a custom ROM (and maybe a custom kernel) as I like the idea of improved performance and having my OS specifically tailored to my phone. It seems like there is a massive number of options available to people who want to customize their Android phone, and I'd really appreciate some advice as to where I should start looking.
I have read up a bit on prominent ROM's like CM, PA, SlimBean, MIUI, etc, but user experiences tend to vary pretty widely. Basically, I am all for minimalism, stability, and trying to get my battery to last as long as possible. I'm really just looking for an elegant, intuitive ROM that is fast and efficient and doesn't need too much running on the back end to do what it needs to do. I really like PA's Halo notifications, but from what I have read the ROM itself can be a bit buggy and sluggish relative to other ROM's. Is there any way I can integrate Halo notifications into a more lightweight ROM?
Finally, it seems like running custom kernels has the potential to improve performance/battery life/etc, but usage is so user-specific that it's impossible to say which kernel is "best" for such things. If that is the case, is there an easy way of understanding their strengths and weaknesses so I can decide which one is right for me? I'm just a bit lost as of right now .
Thanks for the help!
Downloaded7 said:
Hi all,
I am gearing up to get a Nexus 4 in a couple of weeks following its price drop, and I think I'd like to install a custom ROM (and maybe a custom kernel) as I like the idea of improved performance and having my OS specifically tailored to my phone. It seems like there is a massive number of options available to people who want to customize their Android phone, and I'd really appreciate some advice as to where I should start looking.
I have read up a bit on prominent ROM's like CM, PA, SlimBean, MIUI, etc, but user experiences tend to vary pretty widely. Basically, I am all for minimalism, stability, and trying to get my battery to last as long as possible. I'm really just looking for an elegant, intuitive ROM that is fast and efficient and doesn't need too much running on the back end to do what it needs to do. I really like PA's Halo notifications, but from what I have read the ROM itself can be a bit buggy and sluggish relative to other ROM's. Is there any way I can integrate Halo notifications into a more lightweight ROM?
Finally, it seems like running custom kernels has the potential to improve performance/battery life/etc, but usage is so user-specific that it's impossible to say which kernel is "best" for such things. If that is the case, is there an easy way of understanding their strengths and weaknesses so I can decide which one is right for me? I'm just a bit lost as of right now .
Thanks for the help!
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Personally, I've gone back to stock because of stability and battery life. Best thing is to try them. You can't really brick a Nexus
Be quick to pick one up. They're going out of stock very quickly.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
NathanBookham said:
Be quick to pick one up. They're going out of stock very quickly.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
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yes they are. 8gb are gone.
Any word on supply scarcity in the UK? I am in Denmark right now and I can't order from the Play Store until I get back to England. If by the time I get back they are all gone, I might as well skip the wait and buy one for a little more money on Amazon right now.
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I9500 or 9505?
To be honest, the official TW roms are super battery friendly (really don't know why).
I tested my phone an my friends and he had 90% left while I was at ~80% left with half the screen on time.
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For 9505 you can use a lot kernel. Hulk imperium ael etc. Etc. You can test best life.
But for 9500 we have not much choices we have 1 kernel 9505 is luckier.
I think stock roms good without customizations when we customed battery getting worse again i am not happy about battery.
Edit: yes kitkat was better for 9500 i dont remember 9505 i had sometimes. Then i got 9500.
I get 2hour screen time like kidding
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Touchwiz ROM's definitely, without a doubt for me - they have the most features by miles (not necessarily best battery life)! As for which specific custom T/W rom? There are so many to choose from. The best is to try them all out until you find THE ONE that resonates with YOU - that's half the fun... and it won't cost you a cent (unless you donate something for it!
I don't even want to mention NAMES because I feel it's UNFAIR to promote one ROM over another (especially when their differences are few and far between), but a good indication of a GOOD ROM is normally the amount of posts and views it received in its thread. Read through it and check the comments to make up your mind. Then take that bold step.
Good luck and have fun!
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MuF123 said:
Are there any slimmed down touchwiz roms? I don't want all the bloatware...
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Halcyon's v9.1 or quantum rom is pretty good. I've tried quantum rom, aroma installer let's you pick what you want to install as a system app in setup. You can install exactly zero samsung bloatware if you want.
My only problem with it is the sluggish struggle known as touchwiz. It's not too slow, just... slow. CM based roms OTOH fly past it with reckless abandon but seem so fail at battery life.
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MuF123 said:
edit: those are for exynos :/ I've edited thread name.
**snip**
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I saw S4 and assumed wrongly then. Good luck to you in finding a good rom for 9505.
If i9500 performance is anything to go by, latest CM-based roms (if one of them works for you) are awesome unless they feast on the battery.
You may have options for that though, I think there are more than 1 kernel for 9505. One of them may give good battery life.
I've been trying a lot of different CM12.1 builds on my 9505 lately. As they come, battery life is usually average at best. I greatly improved it by flashing the alucard kernel and undervolting my CPU. I found that I could easily shave off up to 100mV off my CPU at pretty much all frequencies without losing stability. Now my battery lasts a day and a half, which is more than I'd get with any stock ROM. I tried it with Resurrection Remix and got the same results, oly it had more bugs so I switched back to CM.
G'Day all my friends of the shining sun!
I'm a S4-owner since the first second and I really like that mobile... On the hardware site. I switched from the iPhone 4s and I loved to playing around with Android, Tasker, Flashing... Etc pp.
But I missed this "set it up and just use it"-feeling. Why? Because I have to care about the battery life, about the speed and about the storage space. So I tried all possible roms, starting with A like Alucard, over CM, Google Edition, Samsung Stock, crDroid, Abele, optimized cm... And now I'm with kushan rom.
Thank you all for this fantastic community, for the development, for the reports, help, Q&A, love and peace for the world!! There are also nice tweaks, features, gimmicks and other crazy stuff for everyone - awesome!
BUT: It feels like that there is no really stable build in any rom. There are still some little bugs that no one cares about because of the new Android (every year) and no one fixed it. Especially the CM's only nightly and monthly builds politic... Maybe I have very exotic problems or I'm still to stupid to find the stable one.. Anyway I'm unhappy
I'm just looking for a really stable and basic rom, that is fast and low on battery consumption. I just use the smartphone for browsing, sms, camera and Bluetooth music connection to my car... That's it, nothing more.
I don't like to start a big discussion of the best rom or sth like that, I'm just looking for tips because I don't have more ideas. Additionally I don't care about the newest rom... It just have to work (see the paragraph before).
Thank you
Nira
(traveling 1year in Australia... to improve my English )
Performance and battery don't go along very well.
For stability and battery life you would be looking at stock roms. But, for some reason, people have problems even with stock roms. So what does that tell you?
Even stock roms aren't completely stable.
Marshmallow took android's speed up a notch. Everything seems snappier. Although, there are still issues. But they vary from user to user.
People say that Lollipop didn't improve over Kitkat in terms of battery life.
Toucwhiz still has the best camera app and can make most of the camera features (HDR, Slow-Motion). And it probably also has better battety life. We are talking about stock touchwhiz, not a custom touchwhiz.
Slim roms are very basic, with a few extras.
AOSP roms from JDCTeam are even more stripped down. It's just basic android.
Keep in mind that wifi and mobile data are big battery drainers. I can maybe get 2 hours SOT with wifi or mobile data activated. But I can probably double or triple that with wifi and mobile data off.
But I don't use the more fancy features of the phone, like GPS and such.
Hello, I know the choice is personal and regarding my own needs in terms of performance, battery etc. , but i'd like to know which kernel you are using, why etc.
I am not very good at seeing performance difference between 2 kernels and your feedback is often great to hear
Which one for you is the most user friendly with features like color calibration, vibration strength (things with GUI you know i don't care about scheduler or whatever)
I think imma settle down on No Limits OOS Rom, which offers a large choice of kernels...
Thank you in advance :')
You will never ever get a proper answer for this question Every kernel has its own characteristics and features, so try yourself and determine which one fits best for you
Going to have to go with the fact that this thread has been made countless times and you never get a definite answer. If you want a truthful opinion, stick with stock. It was designed for your device specifically. Especially in the case of OnePlus devices, they devise the kernel to fit with Oxygen OS. I stick with stock kernel and stock rom because the roms out there are bogus. Theres usually something the dev has done to their rom to disrupt continuity and stabilization especially with google apps and services. Always trying to "debloat" the phone is not a good idea. Letting the phone run its course is a much better way to go because it will adjust to what you actually use. Changing your kernel doesn't do very much for you. In my experience it is always worse. I havent changed the way i use a smartphone since the day i bought one and every kernel ive ever been on has never POSITIVELY affected: 1. Performance 2. Stability 3. Battery life 4. Speed of service 5. internet speed 6. Screen on time 7. Longevity
The claims that they do something for those things is typically a red flag for me. Every time i used franco kernel for example, my internet would cut out a lot and on some occasions YouTube would work for a few videos then not at all until i restarted my phone. On stock kernel, my phone never has these malfunctions but no matter which release on the 3t and the 5 now with his kernel my google stuff would constantly break down or my internet would die until i restarted or i would be permanently stuck on H+ until reboot. Just something annoying like that. And no i did not install this wrong or anything. Its not like you really can with how TWRP works. If the phone turns on then whatever goes wrong is on that rom and that kernel and theyre very unstable beasts.
TL;DR
Always stick with stock. It is built for YOUR device specifically. Don't debloat, disable. Stock kernel is always superior and in the case of OnePlus you have additional doze options in its built in settings. Don't run doze apps either btw. Let your system manage itself you'll find it does a damn fine job.
This question takes a little research to answer, some reading specifically. By seeing the features and commits present in each kernel offered, you'll be able to see where the focus of the dev is. All devs have different things in mind, some will lean towards extending battery longevity, whereas others will prefer a smooth UI and gaming performance, because after all, the processor in this phone can deliver good stuff for all these different leanings.
Anyway, go read a little, see through the devs lens and take your best pick.
My final and subjective opinion? Lightning kernel, blu spark, flash, elementalX, Franco...in no respective order.
I also have a lot of respect for the guys in RenderZenith. Building EAS from nothing is no short of a benchmark, and that kernel is really good as well.
Or as the gentleman above, stay in stock, it was built from scratch by the manufacturer for this device only and no other.
Do you have Stock or Custom Rom and why?
The vendor firmware landscape has been increasingly adequate for quite some time, providing multiple viable options for a satisfactory mobile experience - buying a device with the intention to separate from its out of the box experience as much as possible no longer makes a compelling case against the unique, and sometimes identity-forming, features provided as stock.
During earlier years, Android, and mobile firmware in general, was controlled by regulations and risks while expanding an entirely new platform. There is no alternative otherwise, and anything less conservative would border reckless abandon.
This paved the way for many enthusiasts under no control to have immersed themselves into the technology like the career engineers and developers were doing, but with the nearly full freedom to test ambitious ideas and solutions unlike their professional peers, who were often limited to free time and with no expectation of something even as simple as maintaining a message board OP exploring those ideas.
This allowed many of those ideas to manifest and be thoroughly tested by many and with an unmatched diversity of real-world usages and trending philosophies. This is when many projects helped form several of the early features unique to the Android platform, absorbing a substantial portion of the risks without fear of retribution, allowing the vendors to devote more time to polish and fine-tuning and less time devoted to brainstorming ideas and risk scenarios.
This afforded the hobbyists a custom platform having quite the head start and that could distance itself from the vendor experience in features, accessibility, and form.
Custom rom's had a different identity then than custom rom's do now, and that is with good reason as well.
Ignoring the few debatable exceptions, custom rom's are currently little more than variations or slight modifications of vendor firmware or AOSP. I exclude CM/LOS simply because CM was among the hobbyists described earlier.
With the feature gap as narrow as it currently is with Mr. Rom Dev and Mr. Lead Software Engineer, the professionals now enjoy an edge with often unlimited resources available providing an experience that is hard to match or exceed with limited time and resources, so users today understandably gravitate towards the familiar vendor experience with a manageable number of features or tweaks.
Of course, even in a market of no stock, consumer demand still determines the custom software landscape.
The benefit today is that ideas and solutions require an extraordinary amount of ingenuity and progressive thinking to stand out and enjoy active development for more than six months. The breakthroughs are far fewer but they are also more impactful in pushing the platform forward.
Having said all that, my purpose for exclusive use of vendor firmware is for hobbyist development reasons. I see no benefit a custom rom would provide for development. I mean, if it works, great. But, if it works only because of the rom, you have essentially prepared something to share among a fraction of one device's users.
If something fails to implement into the vendor firmware, I move on to something else. If it works great for some custom rom's, "Cool, man!", if not, a user has the choice to use the only firmware a developer could logically assume is in use.
So, put gh down for Stock! :good:
Yes, but with custom rom you can have better battery stats. You can also have fewer google apps.. And many more.
I use xXx NoLimits: a stock-based custom ROM. It meets all of my needs. Therefore, I have no reasons to try anything else.
lazostat said:
Yes, but with custom rom you can have better battery stats. You can also have fewer google apps.. And many more.
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I'm getting 10-12 hours of screen on time and idle time is about .3-.6% drain let hour on stock on OOS. There isn't anything custom out there giving anything better.
Eric214 said:
I'm getting 10-12 hours of screen on time and idle time is about .3-.6% drain let hour on stock on OOS. There isn't anything custom out there giving anything better.
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This.
Getting 10-11h SoT every cycle with stock ROM. Got 11ish hours the other day with almost 3 full days without charging.
Haven't seen anything better or much better then THIS.
lazostat said:
Yes, but with custom rom you can have better battery stats. You can also have fewer google apps.. And many more.
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Stock firmware does not necessarily need to remain "untouched".
Perhaps, a more accurate answer would be that my preference for a foundation on which to tailor to my specific needs is the stock OxygenOS firmware. It is certainly rare for users with root access to refrain from making a single change to the installed rom, be it custom or stock. :good:
With this phone it is the first time I've had to come to accept that stock is king, no custom rom compares to it, I've tried them all (yes this is subjective). Stock + a custom kernel + viper4arise and off I go.
I dont know if you count it as stock or custom since it is both but i use HydrogenOS and my own modification of its stock kernel. Im used to 9 hours SoT+ with .2% standby drain per hour. No performance sacrificed. Ill vote in the poll once u verify which u factor hydrogen os as.
tWoBrO said:
This.
Getting 10-11h SoT every cycle with stock ROM. Got 11ish hours the other day with almost 3 full days without charging.
Haven't seen anything better or much better then THIS.
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ok can you provide more insight? how you get it done......i average about 4-5.5 hours sot over two days........idle drain at1.33 and active at 12.55.
How I get it done? Everyone uses the phone differently, have different apps installed, etc.
Last few days I have used Wi-Fi 99% of the time, always on, Facebook, IG, Tapatalk (a lot), Gmail, Movies HD (a lot), Terrarium-tv (a lot), YouTube, a couple calls and sms here and there, but not much, Messenger, Chrome and app-like-Spotify with bluetooth on the car. I turn on location and bluetooth only when I need it.
Auto brightness is on, always on the low side, dark theme on, turned off vibration on touch (because of the double vibration bug in Oreo), turned vibration of on keyboard touch too (have sound on instead, I like the type writer sound when I type).
Let me see, I do have privacy fix module and sysconfig patcher installed on Magisk. This last one might gave you a boost in battery, but to be honest I don't even know if it actually works.
I would say that having a dark theme, screen brightness on the low side, and not having EVERYTHING turned on all the time are what makes the difference for me. I'm sure if I have bluetooth and location on, for example, all the time, when not needed it, it will cut a my time quite a bit.
Oh, I have notice that talking on the phone takes a lot battery. I don't talk that much on the phone, just those quick 30s-5m calls to ask a quick question or whatever.
I had great battery life out of the box with Nougat, but Oreo really made a huge difference. I'm talking about 2-3h of SoT on Oreo compared to Nougat.
Stock atw and ftw!
Finn the moment the phone I get breathes it's getting a custom ROM.
Always.
For a device like OnePlus 5, a custom ROM isn't really needed since the stock ROM is pretty much debloated and already offers a bunch of features.
Custom ROMs still offer many more features than any stock ROM though. They also get faster updates and for far longer. By the time OnePlus stopped providing updates to this device, custom ROMs will still be updated most probably.
I haven't flashed any custom ROM yet because the stock ROM has almost everything I need. The main reason I flashed ROMs was performance. The OnePlus 5 isn't lacking in this area.
Pure fusion, the Nougat version. It's the smoothest of all ROMs that I tried, has lots of settings and supports stock camera.
Codename Phoenix. Oreo 8.1, Very few bugs and for me a lot better than Stock. From the same dev making Pure Fusion.
CT-CRC said:
With this phone it is the first time I've had to come to accept that stock is king, no custom rom compares to it, I've tried them all (yes this is subjective). Stock + a custom kernel + viper4arise and off I go.
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How a custom kernel can help? I installed bluspark but i dont see additional settings.. How to make us of it?
CT-CRC said:
With this phone it is the first time I've had to come to accept that stock is king, no custom rom compares to it, I've tried them all (yes this is subjective). Stock + a custom kernel + viper4arise and off I go.
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Totally subjective and IMHO completely not true, you are hindered without root and without the ability to alter your phone in a positive way, not only for longevity of battery life but also in regards to performance, stability and stamina.
Stock does not compare to custom in any way for me.
Optimized custom rom could be great when the device is old, and no more supported.
Also, back in the days, let say with Gingerbread 2.3.x, not much nice/modded feature were present. Now, from what I can see, stock roms got almost everything.
OP5 is so fast rigt now, even if stock is heavier, we won't see much difference with a lighter rom.
But looking forward for custom roms in 2-3 years.