Database Users

There's just no way to get rid of the lag

I know, it's a 2 year old phone with just 1GB RAM and TouchWiz on top of it.
I've spent the last 2 days trying a LOT of roms to try to make the phone feel faster, because I don't want to buy a new one. I really like this one. The camera is AMAZING, decent battery life, love blocking mode, etc. As a phone it works great: good speaker, strong vibration, great signal, etc.
But there's one single thing that makes this phone feel "old": the speed. Just the speed. If it were faster and more fluid then there would be absolutely no reason to upgrade to the new phones (except, well, maybe more RAM and battery).
Yesterday I tried like 15 AOSP roms: CM11, temasek, ultimaAOSP, NeatROMAOSP, Vanir, AOKP, SlimKat, etc.
Nothing. It's slightly faster, but the problem is the animations. They just look wrong all the time. There's frame drops everywhere. And bugs and crashes, so back to Samsung stock today. Tried another 10 samsung based roms. Nothing new. Speed is still the same and frame drops are still there...
I guess I'll have to end up buying a new phone, but definitely not a flagship. I'm looking at midrange phones that come with AOSP. Found one with 2GB RAM, 13Mpx camera, 2500 battery, 5 inch 720P IPS screen, microSD and dual SIM for 199$. Great price, and comes with 4.4 stock Android.
Tried the phone at the store the other day and it just made my SGS3 look like the midranger, and that with a MediaTek A7 1.3 quad core!

+++
Exactly. Well,animations are smooth on AOSP with right kernel,but still not as it should be. This phone sucks when it comes to UI performance.
Now I even got broken camera and media playback,too,after stressing it with every new test on my phone.
Well,probably this phone worked the best with 4.1.2. I think it's all about crappy processor,called exynos.
EDIT: Btw,you can try archidroid 1x with his boeffla presets,though. After all,it's not that bad.

I think you are just setting unrealistic expectations if none of those ROMS, without TouchWiz, were any good for you.

There is nothing crappy about the processor mate. your case is an isolated issue. If the archi ROM is not smooth for you then there is something wrong with your phone.
it's always wise to stick to ROMs and kernels which are built using proper sources.
Do not restore a massive amount of data soon after a flash. Let the ROM settle a bit. Trim your device memory once in a while.
Also a megawipe is recommended after so many flashes.
Sent from my GT-I9300 using XDA Free mobile app

I put Cyanogenmod CM11 on mine after updating to stock 4.3. It felt like a completely different phone and brought back the speed. It absolutely flies and battery time is double what it was on stock 4.3.

I tested alot of Roms but regading speed and batterylife i use Temasek with Yank kernel. No OC and de S3 flys.

Oh god, it's like reading a thread I could have written myself. I feel you, mate. Got the same damn frustations sometimes.
It seems that whichever ROM "camp" you choose, you're gonna have drawbacks. Tried so many different variants of TW-roms and i just feel they are all too slow and with lags.
Many of the AOSP-roms are quite fast (using ArchiDroid atm which is incredibly fast!) but then you get the problem of crappy camera, no Allshare, tethering issues, many games that have sound-issues and all those random bugs we all know about but try to live with
Perhaps the new Kitkat port can solve these issues but it seems there is a lot of work to be done still. Still I'm glad there's a community like XDA with such awesome people (Like Kryten who posted earlier ) who put the time into developing these things.. Or we would be stuck with even slower ROM's from Samsung.

Is there any way to get rid of it, or at least reduce it?

Install smart droid, further debloat, run greenify and boeffla, custom launcher and its quick, no lag

Even the s5 can't run without lag using Touchwiz.
Sent from my D6503 using Tapatalk

jennifercolemanme said:
Is there any way to get rid of it, or at least reduce it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes there is, activate Developer Options by tapping on the Build Number in About Phone. In there are 3 settings for animations. The 1st thing I do on every rom is decrease them to 25%. On CM11 and temaseks builds you have a slider which allows you to fine tune the settings instead of the picker which you find on other roms.
My personal experience is that OmniRom is just snappier than any of the others, even when I have a whole bunch of apps open, incoming calls get displayed almost instantly, the dialer and contacts open almost instantly. In my case of course. Everyone has their favourite rom/kernel combination. I have also had great success using Yank555's kernel with the default settings (which include a slight overclock with no noticeable battery drain.

So my temporarily solution is to completely disable the animations in developer settings.
It's a good solution, for now.
My combo right now is stock Samsung 4.3 debloated (many useless apps freezed. Other apps freezed also using Titanium Backup) with Boeffla kernel.
It gets annoying when animations aren't smooth and consistent, but I guess it's expected when Touchwiz is on top and just 1GB RAM.
Taking about RAM, this phone has almost no multitasking also! It's impossible to keep one Chrome or Internet tab open in the background while you do something else. When you go back to the Internet app it has to reload again.
And no custom rom can fix this either. I spent one week with AOSP Vanir rom and didn't had multitasking there either.
What I'm trying to say is that this phone has turned old faster than it should have, precisely because of a bad 4.3 update by Samsung and also just 1GB RAM.
And talking about speed and lag again, trust me, I've tied all the good roms available. It won't matter if you install a custom kernel. If you overclock the phone then battery will last even less than before, and it doesn't make a huge difference in speed animation and fluidity.
I'm sure AOSP roms like CM11 and others do work faster and more fluid in newest phones like G2, SGS4, HTC One, etc. It's because they have a better processor and 2GB RAM.
In the end I think it's the hardware that's to blame for the lag (and bad 4.3 update by Samsung too).
The phone is great otherwise. I love almost everything about it, like I previously said. Most times I can't believe how good the camera is, the screen is enough for me (no need for 1080P), size and weight is perfect, etc.
I would have preferred to own the US SGS3 model with it's 2GB RAM than the EU model. In the long run I think it's better.
But anyway, the lag is not huge, just annoying. And I only notice it when opening and closing apps.

Try entering development settings and change the animator duration scale to 0.5 the transition animation scale to 0.5 and the window animation scale to 0.5
It will make anything faster
Sent from my GT-I9300 using XDA Free mobile app

AlmoGS said:
Try entering development settings and change the animator duration scale to 0.5 the transition animation scale to 0.5 and the window animation scale to 0.5
It will make anything faster
Sent from my GT-I9300 using XDA Free mobile app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You don't understand it.
It doesn't matter the scale animation (just tried with 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 again), there's still frame drops everywhere.
It doesn't make anything "faster". It's even more annoying watching the frame drops at 0.25.
It's not a solution. There is NO solution to the animation frame drops, not even on custom roms...
Only "solution" is to turn animation scale completely to 0.

I have sgs3 intl and I had a lot of lags and frame drops and I switched to CM 11 nightly and it's became faster and no frame drop and it's like new.
What Android version do you use?
Sent from my GT-I9300 using XDA Free mobile app

if you want to have the same camera quality, i suggest you archidroid 1.7.16.
faster rom i ever tried

What lag? My S3 is smmmmoooooooth on CM11
Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

Sensamic said:
You don't understand it.
It doesn't matter the scale animation (just tried with 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 again), there's still frame drops everywhere.
It doesn't make anything "faster". It's even more annoying watching the frame drops at 0.25.
It's not a solution. There is NO solution to the animation frame drops, not even on custom roms...
Only "solution" is to turn animation scale completely to 0.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Alright,my last bet will be to go on Archidroid stock based ROM,use it's own boeffla preset setting and turn animations to 1.5x. Animations will be smooth all around,only custom launcher is needed,because when opening or closing apps on touchwiz,it's still stuttery. I'm still using touchwiz launcher,though (lovely animations all around!).
I noticed 1.0x is the worst speed for animations on stock ROMs. I mean,with 1.0x,I notice some fps drops much more when opening a new windows with animations. Like it's too fast for CPU to tune right time for speed and animation and that makes it laggy. So it's all about wrong timing,as 0.5x also feels much more smoother,it's noticeable.
But the 1.5x setting compensates that. No more stuttery animations at all and it feels pretty beautiful. This was my last solution for stock touchwiz ROM,and I'm pretty happy. Try it yourself.
EDIT: Btw,if you also want to keep touchwiz,try xposed app settings,find there touchwiz launcher and tick the checkbox for "resident" option. That way it will keep the launcher in memory hardly,so when you will go back to launcher , shadows under the icons won't redraw and thus stuttery animations will be reduced and will happen much more rare.

On multitasking, try maximising your swap. Never have problems going from Chrome, email, FB etc. Also try removing apps 'receiver' settings, so they don't open on unlock, wifi connect etc..
Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk

There have been a select FEW roms that solved most of the issues you talking about, but they mostly old and the developers have moved on. The truth is, AOSP kitkat isnt optimized for our phones and you most likely wont find a stock based ROM that doesn't lag. I think the main culprit is Jellybean + Samsung together. I don't ever recall ICS having frame drops or lagging really. Samsung did a crappy job optimizing jellybean for our phone. Jellybean is hardware intensive, more than ICS and Kitkat. Seems like it was a temp solution while Google worked on KitKat and now our phone is unfortunately stuck there.
Do yourself a favor and don't get a Samsung if you want proper performance.

Bloody G3 - I need to rant

I know this is going to sound very much like a first world problem, but this phone is frustratingly ****. It is easily the buggiest, slowest, most laggy phone I have ever had.
I have tried just about all the LG based ROMS, only to find that each one, although not buggy, are all laggy. The lag is so bad that it gives my old S2 on Gingerbread a run for its money. At least with Samsung phones, you could get rid of the lag by using a AOSP ROM and it would still be functional.
To solve the frustrating lag issue, I have installed a CM based ROM. At first I was delighted. The lag was gone. The phone was now comparable to my super fast Nexus 5. But after a few hours, I noticed the same bugs that every other CM based ROM user has. Today, I had to restart the phone six times FFS! It is a little more stable on 777 Kernel, but the same issues still persist.
Has anyone achieved bliss with this phone? Is there any ROMS, AOSP or LG based, that are fast, (Nexus 5 fast), and bug free?
Don't get me wrong, I love devs and the work they do. Without them, my old Galaxy phones, (S1, S2, S3, S4), would have been poo. My Nexus 5 would have been boring. (Stock android is meh). I just don't understand why this phone seems to have so many issues. Help me understand why it is so hard to develop a fast and reliable ROM for this phone. I know it isn't from a lack of trying. There is heaps of support and devs working on various ROMS in the G3 threads already and all of them are very talented.
Is it hardware based lag or is there something else inherently wrong with the phone?
Thanks for reading and offering any solutions. I don't want to list the ROMS I have tried, as it will seem like I am an ungrateful twat to those devs that worked so hard. Suffice to say, I have tried all the popular CM/AOSP and LG based ROMS.

Stock 5.0 V20H fine for me no lag [emoji3]

I switched to note 4 whilst g3 was good I had a better experience with my note 3. So upgraded
-= Note 4 & Gear VR =-

hashcheck said:
I switched to note 4 whilst g3 was good I had a better experience with my note 3. So upgraded
-= Note 4 & Gear VR =-
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't want to switch so soon. There has to be a solution. I love the screen and size of this phone. The only other phone I would consider is the droid turbo, but it's so bloody expensive!

DoobyDroid said:
Stock 5.0 V20H fine for me no lag [emoji3]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Compared to what? Which other android phone have you used? In isolation, this phone is barely acceptable. Then, after you use a nexus, HTC or Sony phone, this phone is comparably slow. Almost unusable.
I can't bring myself to try stock again until someone who has other phones to base their claims on can confirm it is lag free.

cubic25 said:
Compared to what? Which other android phone have you used? In isolation, this phone is barely acceptable. Then, after you use a nexus, HTC or Sony phone, this phone is comparably slow. Almost unusable.
I can't bring myself to try stock again until someone who has other phones to base their claims on can confirm it is lag free.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried the usual tricks?
1. Swap out the stock launcher for something like Nova or Apex
2. Switch your keyboard to a 3rd party keyboard
While it does suffer from the random stutter, my phone is generally very zippy and does not lag.

Done all that. On stock based ROMS, stutter and lag is unbearable. My wife, nexus 5 user, even commented on how bad it is. I'm actually embarrassed to use the phone in front of people. I know it isn't a hardware issue, because AOSP ROMS are lag free, but not bug free.

Yeah, the phone is nowhere near as quick as a Nexus. The notification bar is also **** compared to stock Lollipop. There are a few tricks I use to improve performance on a stock rom:
1) Turn off throttling/thermal daemon via the service menu.
2) I use setCPU to set the phone to use the "performance" scheduler whenever the screen is on, locking it at 2.5Ghz.
Still isn't perfect, but it helps substantially. Obviously this is in addition to changing the launcher.
It's just one of those things. As you say, CM12 just isn't stable and worryingly seems to be going backwards, getting less and less stable with each passing nightly. The camera is also completely crap on AOSP roms. Nexus devices are great but the N5 is old and the N6 is too big and expensive. The S5 lags too, and while Note 4 is supposed to be good, but I simply won't believe that Touchwiz lag is gone without seeing it with my own eyes. Even if it has gone, Touchwiz remains the ugliest skin I've ever seen. Sony phones are nice, but they aren't packaged anywhere near as tightly as the G3, which is it's biggest strength: 22mm shorter than an iPhone 6+, with the same size screen. That's impressive. HTC's are just ridiculously large for a given screen size. The 1+1 is old now, and doesn't support all LTE bands used in the UK.
There is no perfect phone. Whichever you choose, there are compromises to be made. However IMHO the G3 strikes the best compromise available today, at least once running the latest Lollipop build and with the tweaks I mentioned above applied.

Had most 2014 flagships and G3 is deff fav so far, didnt have KK as updated to LP out the box had little lag after ota but common just needed a factory reset and all good since

Just a tip you can use on any android phone, go to settings, developer options, and set all the animations to 0.5x. This drastically reduces the time the animations take, and it gives a very snappy experience. It makes a LOT of difference, trust me.

No lag whatsoever here. Im running Chupachups newest rom with rin kernel. I've previously owned htc one, lg g2, xperia z1 and this phone definitely outperforms them all.

Ive owned the Xperia Z1, HTC One M7, and tbh id rate this better than both, i would like the battery life to be better my Z1 was amazing for that buh im custom stock rom and i dont get lag, everything is as it should be.

cubic25 said:
I know this is going to sound very much like a first world problem, but this phone is frustratingly ****. It is easily the buggiest, slowest, most laggy phone I have ever had.
...
Has anyone achieved bliss with this phone? Is there any ROMS, AOSP or LG based, that are fast, (Nexus 5 fast), and bug free?
...
Is it hardware based lag or is there something else inherently wrong with the phone?
...
.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Because LL is still unstable and buggy? And so is any rom based on it?..
Stock firmware sucks because of LG's software - it's very badly written. Almost as bad as touchwiz is. (I used SGS3, trust me on that one...)
AOSP/CM based firmwares are better, but they still suffer due do LL newness. Wait till android 5.1, things may become better.
There is also a hardware issue: unbelievably bad heat management. They used 8974ac, but had not made any cooling system. No radiators, no heat spread throughout the case, and it's facing LCD panel - which is a very bad radiator. GG WP, throttling kick in, phone starts to lag, etc etc etc.

I think there may be problem with your unit... Try to send it back to get a replacement or have it serviced.
Sent from my LG-D855 using XDA Free mobile app

I agree that most of the stock LG-G3 roms, Lollipop/Kitkat, if not rooted and without any mods, LAG is unavoidable. The case is, some people can't root their phones and most of them will try searching why G3 stock rom is lagging... if I'm one of them and I happen to see this post, I would feel bad and feel stupid at the same time why I spend money buying a crappy phone.
Well anyways, try Crash Rom v2.0. It is a stock based ROM like chupachups. The animation is not as fluid as CM but I won't say that it's lagging. Compared to CM, I have not yet encountered any bugs and mostly the camera is better. If you're interested you can also downgrade the resolution to 1080p, this will enhance your g3, 3d and 2d graphics performance.

Hi im all so on lollipop 5.0 updated out of the box and its all good maybe some lag not much to notice. Still no root method yet for stock lollipop 5.0 and i dont want to downgrade to kk so il have patience and wait for new root method for me g3

Wow, I went from the nexus 5, to the htc m8, to the g3 all in year. My advice, play with this one to get the phone lag gone. This by far is the best. Like a previous person said, turn off animations and change the launcher.

mab71 said:
I think there may be problem with your unit... Try to send it back to get a replacement or have it serviced.
Sent from my LG-D855 using XDA Free mobile app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can't be an issue with the phone, as it is lag free with CM based ROMS.
marfioso said:
I agree that most of the stock LG-G3 roms, Lollipop/Kitkat, if not rooted and without any mods, LAG is unavoidable. The case is, some people can't root their phones and most of them will try searching why G3 stock rom is lagging... if I'm one of them and I happen to see this post, I would feel bad and feel stupid at the same time why I spend money buying a crappy phone.
Well anyways, try Crash Rom v2.0. It is a stock based ROM like chupachups. The animation is not as fluid as CM but I won't say that it's lagging. Compared to CM, I have not yet encountered any bugs and mostly the camera is better. If you're interested you can also downgrade the resolution to 1080p, this will enhance your g3, 3d and 2d graphics performance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll give crash a go this afternoon and report back. Hopefully 5.1 ROMS fix the issue too.
dspcap said:
Wow, I went from the nexus 5, to the htc m8, to the g3 all in year. My advice, play with this one to get the phone lag gone. This by far is the best. Like a previous person said, turn off animations and change the launcher.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Already done all that. Animations are turned off, launcher animations are set to lightning fast, CPU throttling is turned off. I've tried all the tricks in the book. Fact is, LG based software is crap, just like Samsung.
So far today, the lock-screen has only frozen on me four times, which is good.
I'm not sure if I'd rather put up with a laggy phone or a buggy phone.

My phone is currently on V20h. Apart from the occasional Home launcher crash, I've not had any lag that I notice of. The last time there was any lag was on V10i. My phone is rooted but is not running any mods.
Prior to this, I've had the Note 3 and Xperia S. Compared to the G3, I would say that the smoothness is at the very least, on par with the Note 3 running on stock.
I've seen people complaining about the G3 being laggy too. Is your phone by any chance the 2 GB RAM version?

My phone is the 2gb version, but I always have at least close to 300mb free. Sometimes I have over 1gb free. Not that it should matter though, as I have read on numerous places that the 3gb version lags too, and that both phones are very close on performance. The extra 1gb of RAM is negligible.
Just flashing Crash ROM now. I think I'm going to regret it though, as I much prefer the look of AOSP anyway.
Ah crap. Just as I flash the ROM, I read that the dev is stopping support for our device. Based on the comments, it looks like a promising ROM.

Is Lollipop really worth upgrading to?

So, Samsung finally released Lollipop for just about every Note 4 variant now but, after reading a lot of people suffering from huge battery drain, overheating and random crashes, I'm just wondering if I should bother updating to lollypop myself.
I'm still on stock 4.4.4 (with a fair amount of mods) and my phone runs exactly how I want it to. The only ever problem I have is sometimes contacts crashes, but it's not even done that for about a week.
What are the advantages (if any) of upgrading to lollipop?
Let's see if you can convince me to part with my very stable and perfectly functional modded 4.4.4.

Chillerhippie said:
So, Samsung finally released Lollipop for just about every Note 4 variant now but, after reading a lot of people suffering from huge battery drain, overheating and random crashes, I'm just wondering if I should bother updating to lollypop myself.
I'm still on stock 4.4.4 (with a fair amount of mods) and my phone runs exactly how I want it to. The only ever problem I have is sometimes contacts crashes, but it's not even done that for about a week.
What are the advantages (if any) of upgrading to lollipop?
Let's see if you can convince me to part with my very stable and perfectly functional modded 4.4.4.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
BOC5 works perfectly fine here and is a lot smoother than any KitKat version that I used prior. If you play a lot of games then chances are you might run into the GPU bug, but other than that I see no problems in going with the newest Android version available. :good:

I got N910C. No root.
These are some facts about KK & LP according to my own experience.
KitKat 4.4.4:
Had volume spike answering bug (mentioned somewhere on XDA),
Had read only SD card problem (due to Android restrictions),
Lollipop 5.0.1:
Solved both above mentioned issues of KK,
Faster and smoother than KK,
No crashes, freezes, hickups, overheating - rock stable,
Better RAM management,
Better or equal battery consumption,
Material design (I love it, somebody else may not)
1-2 second answering ''hello hello'' bug (caller can't hear me 1-2 sec. after my answer). I don't know is anybody else has this bug,
GPU throttling bug (when phone reaches about 50 C some games stutter and benchmarks like Antutu show low results due to lower GPU frequencies)
Everything is perfect except this. This should be fixed ASAP in next update.
Be aware of this and consider eventually upgrade to Lollipop

Just in case: lots of shortcut apps (e.g. pulling down the notification bar!) don't work on Samsung's iteration of Lollipop anymore. That's still one of the biggest issues at least for me!

I have updated my UK ee phone to the German BOC3 and I have to say I'm very impressed with it. I have done a dirty flash and I haven't encountered a single issue. My battery life seems better, the system settings feel cleaner and the general visual tweaks and nice. Looking forwards to the btu
Sent from my SM-N910F using XDA Free mobile app

Experience with 5.01 Lollipop Update, i have had no issues with Lollipop
Lp fixed the Bluetooth stuttering bug for playing music in my car via Bluetooth.
The notifications are great and usually appropriate...
No battery crash or menu problems on Bell.
No hello hello bug I have noticed on Bell carrier

JellyBean vs Lillipop / Stock vs Custom

First of all, this is not a childish "versus" topic to flame fanboys spirits. I just need some technical understanding of some issues.
So... I've run four or five Lollipop 5.1.1 custom ROMs on my C5303, including CM, AICP, XenonHD, Mokee. All are great and fast and developers made a tremendous job. Not all of them are so friendly with Tangerine kernel (I need a custom kernel for increasing in-calls phone volume), per instance, Mokee hangs and struggle like hell. AICP works well with T-kernel, but with some issues (reported by users), when the device will freeze for a few seconds. XenonHD loves T-kernel - no problem at all!
Still, all of these fantastic custom ROMs , with or without custom kernel, are sluggish compared with stock 4.3 Sony ROM. I've made a nandroid backup in TWRP of my XenonHD - T-Kernel installation and installed Binomical SLIM 4.3 base don stock. Just for the heck of remembering the Sony UI, I intended to restore XenonHD soon after. I'm still on Binomical 4.3. Man, this is FAST! This is a blazing rocket compared with any of the Lollipop ROMs!
On Lollipop ROMs I've had ~ 300 MB free RAM, on stock 4.3 (OK, deodexed and slim) I only have 150 MB, but Sony's ROM is way faster and smoother. It really looks like I have a completely new device in my hand. How is this possible? Why? The hardware drivers? Is X-SP really not able to handle Lollipop in a decent manner?
XDA developers worked so hard to gave us the Lollipop ROMs, and I praise their work, but looks like X-SP best choice is still the old JellyBean 4.3.

Agree.
All lollipop roms are really fast in the beginning but after sometime,it begins to lag and become slow and sluggish.I have tried many lollipop roms but always returned to stock rom.It's been 2-3 months that i'm on stock and didn't flashed any other rom.

dude flash latest cm12.1 nightly nd ull forget stock

4.1.2>4.3>5.1.1

I dont think this, i not know what version you test of aicp and xennon, thes lasts versions of aicp are laggy and xennon has battery drain sometimes, but the others no, all depends of the rom, have lollipops roms laggy and have lollipop fast roms, have kikkat laggy roms and have kitkat fast roms, and the same of all android version, the rom stock have good performance but battery drains, now i in miui 7, performance and battery are awesome

I NEVER had battery drains on stock ROM. Yes, lots of bloatware on official stock , but not battery drains. I also didn't encounter battery drain on any of the Lollipop ROM's I've tried - AICP stable and about 10 version of nightlies, CM, XenonHD latest and Mokee. Yes, those were not so "green" as stock, but nothing so horrible, maybe 10-20% less battery power than stock. The issues regarding battery were on calibration of the battery percentage, per instance it used to go downward normally till 6%, then, bang!, the telephone turned off with 0% battery all of a sudden. Anyway, this is a insignificant issue, I don't care if I'm gonna recharge battery one hour earlier, the real problem that brought me back to 4.3 stock was the PERFORMANCE.
What I can't figure out is how come 300MB free RAM Lollipop is worst than 150 MB RAM JellyBean. Why? Xperia SP can't deal with ART instructions, it's Dalvik-only? I mean, OK, our developers have limited resources and most of them test their code on their own device, they have to be careful and not trying something risky; by contrast, Sony have unlimited resources to develop and tune their ROM. I know that, it's obvious, all my respect to XDA developers. What I'm trying to figure out is what's that bump in the road, what keeps X-SP Lollipop to be blazing fast? It's ART? It's drivers? I't Tangerine kernel, that most of us "married" with LP ROM's?
Thank you guys.

To be honest, you have answered your own question based on your newer question.
It is optimisation, man. 4.3 (or prior), those stock ROMs are made by Sony. Since it is made by Sony, you can expect a very great deal out of it, battery life, performance and all of those sweet things.
Since Sony lied to SP users and abandoned the SP with the last known version 4.3, we have problems on optimising ROMs because of no official blobs to refer to.
It has been until now. Everything is, thanks to the hard work of developers, our Xperia SP can still run newer Android versions while still maintaining the "blaziness" of the ROM.
Needless to say, its optimisations.
As always, you have the rights on which ROM to use, so choose the one that suits you.

Guys, I am thinking of buying Xperia SP to use with Cyanogenmod 12.1 instead of cheap budget phone like Motorola E 4G. Price for me is the same, actually SP is cheaper than Motorola E.
I like SP because fast CPU and GPU ( Adreno 320 ! ) so it's no slouch and it has official CM12.1 support. I don't want to use anything other than latest 12.1 but I'm worried about performance and battery. Is it really that bad ?
I cannot try out the ROMs myself as I have not bought SP yet.
Is any CM12.1 ROM stable, fast and with good battery performance ? I see you have custom kernels for CM12.1 but what is the Linux version - is it 3.10 or above ?
Does SP have heating issues and performance problems ( like so many claim here ) ? Or maybe that appears only after some years of usage ?
What about this screen flickering problem which seems to be present in all CM12.1 ? How bad is it ?
Thanks for your assistance !

"Does SP have heating issues and performance problems ( like so many claim here ) ? Or maybe that appears only after some years of usage ?" It has those issues, but I think it depends on certain devices. Mine for example overheats with any rom, no matter stock or custom, while there are people who never experience those problems. As for stock vs custom it's clear enough that stock is best optimised.

I tested a lot ROMS.
I like the OMNI ROM (Android 4.4.4). It's really fast and stable. Maybe you should try it.
I like also the Xenon HD ROM (Android 5.1.1). It's fast. Not so stable, but still very good..
After a few days it gets a little laggy. I´d liked to know why to. Faced the same problem with AICP.

I've had similar experience as you guys with lollipop custom ROMS. As much as I wanted to like them, after trying few, I have switched back to stock. Lollipop roms look nice, they offer more features and battery life is amazing compared to stock. However, none of the roms are stable enough to be used as a daily driver. After few days every single one of them refused to boot up, forcing my phone into recovery mode, so the only way out was to reflash. It has been a nice experience, but XSP is my one and only phone needed for communication, not a toy, therefore I need something that works and does it reliably. I think I'd just get a nexus or motorola when it's the time to upgrade.

bulanula said:
Guys, I am thinking of buying Xperia SP to use with Cyanogenmod 12.1 instead of cheap budget phone like Motorola E 4G. Price for me is the same, actually SP is cheaper than Motorola E.
I like SP because fast CPU and GPU ( Adreno 320 ! ) so it's no slouch and it has official CM12.1 support. I don't want to use anything other than latest 12.1 but I'm worried about performance and battery. Is it really that bad ?
I cannot try out the ROMs myself as I have not bought SP yet.
Is any CM12.1 ROM stable, fast and with good battery performance ? I see you have custom kernels for CM12.1 but what is the Linux version - is it 3.10 or above ?
Does SP have heating issues and performance problems ( like so many claim here ) ? Or maybe that appears only after some years of usage ?
What about this screen flickering problem which seems to be present in all CM12.1 ? How bad is it ?
Thanks for your assistance !
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Click to collapse
No heating issues, I mean CPU gets hot sometimes (with not regard of the ROM installed), but it's all at thigh as 60°C. Most Android devices are well in specs on that thermal level.
Performance regarded. CM Vanilla or most of the 5.1.1 custom ROM - it's fast for the day 1, then it gets little sluggish, you'll have to boot to recovery and clear dalvik/art cache to refresh you device. If you don't need kernel level modifications I recommend you to stay with stock FOTA, Tangerine kernel might cause some screen or device freeze and stutter.
Years of usage to get slower performance? LOL We're talking about hours!
Display flickering (or getting yellowish) I guess it's hardware related - some X-SP never experienced it (mine included).

OK. Thanks for your feedback guys. I cannot test myself since I don't have device.
Do you think developer support is strong enough that they will manage to get Android 6 working properly on SP ?

big dilemma
Hi guys,
I have big dilemma what to do. My wife liked to buy the XSP because of the LED lights etc. She uses the phone mostly for calling, texting and music listening. As she has the Deezer premium acc I went in big troubles with XSP because the known bad memory management. More than one year she have bothered with it(and me too . After the 2years waranty ending I have decided to root, UBL and test custom ROMs. First we have tried the lightered stock ArchXperia, which was not helping us. Now she is since August on CM12 nightly. Yes, Deezer works good now, but on the other hand she is missing the stock Sony apps, working LED bar(with music), stock FM radio and generaly dislike the 5.1 Android (she is little bit old school, not likes many new things to learn).
Please, could somebody recommend to me any rom, which is stable, close to stock look (apps incl.) and has good ram management, that Deezer will work good, without memory issues?
Was it maybe wrong, that I have skipped the 4.4.4 Android over?
Many thanks in advance for any kind of tip or idea.

BPavel said:
Hi guys,
I have big dilemma what to do. My wife liked to buy the XSP because of the LED lights etc. She uses the phone mostly for calling, texting and music listening. As she has the Deezer premium acc I went in big troubles with XSP because the known bad memory management. More than one year she have bothered with it(and me too . After the 2years waranty ending I have decided to root, UBL and test custom ROMs. First we have tried the lightered stock ArchXperia, which was not helping us. Now she is since August on CM12 nightly. Yes, Deezer works good now, but on the other hand she is missing the stock Sony apps, working LED bar(with music), stock FM radio and generaly dislike the 5.1 Android (she is little bit old school, not likes many new things to learn).
Please, could somebody recommend to me any rom, which is stable, close to stock look (apps incl.) and has good ram management, that Deezer will work good, without memory issues?
Was it maybe wrong, that I have skipped the 4.4.4 Android over?
Many thanks in advance for any kind of tip or idea.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try a slim stock ROM, just as Binomical, based o stock JB 4.3. .207. It includes Williams kernel and that might do the trick with RAM management.

Yes, thank you, I was thinking about exactly this one... good to have the choice confirmed. Just installed, look forward to try it and test it on my wife

BPavel said:
Yes, thank you, I was thinking about exactly this one... good to have the choice confirmed. Just installed, look forward to try it and test it on my wife
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Or maybe you can check out the cm11 last build. Used to be on cm11 for a year with William's kernel and was pretty good. With some apps you can have the disco lights fully functional.

Looking for personal Rom Recommendation

Can anyone make a recommendation that fits my needs and wants
NEEDS
Dark themeable.
Decent Battery life
Stable
Wants
responsive
no or minimal animation
Decent connectivity LTE/Wifi
I am currently using Resurrection Remix Nougat, but previous version was buggy and laggy so i did a full wipe install of the latest 2 versions and my phone randomly hangs, and have to long hold the power (~30 seconds) to get it to boot.
I appreciate any recommendations.
Please don't waste your time posting if you don't have a recommendation.
Thanks

Change your CPU governor for both big and little cores to Impulse and the weird black screen thing will stop, on RR.
All of the ROMs I've tried, and I've used all of them at this point, have issues.
CRDroid has a laggy camera when switching from 3rd party and dedicated camera apps.
Ground Zero has the same, plus random Wifi to LTE data drop and a reboot need to reconnect.
Dirty Unicorns would have been a winner if Wifi to LTE was more stable and random reboots didn't pop up after a couple days.
AICP has been sort of hit or miss when I tried it. I ditched it because of too many issues.
Just flashed RR again today for the first time since February and it seems good so far. Definitely has some camera lag but it doesn't actually freeze completely.
No ROM on this phone will get good battery life, btw, unless you spend every waking moment trying to save power. Expect 2.5-3.5 SoT max in reality. People will say crazy high numbers sometimes but those are anomalies. Everything is dark themable with Substratum, but Validus by Ground Zero Roms has a built in dark theme. You can turn off animations in dev options on any ROM. I have mine at 0.4 right now. You can set it to 0.0 though if you want.

xgerryx said:
Change your CPU governor for both big and little cores to Impulse and the weird black screen thing will stop, on RR.
All of the ROMs I've tried, and I've used all of them at this point, have issues.
CRDroid has a laggy camera when switching from 3rd party and dedicated camera apps.
Ground Zero has the same, plus random Wifi to LTE data drop and a reboot need to reconnect.
Dirty Unicorns would have been a winner if Wifi to LTE was more stable and random reboots didn't pop up after a couple days.
AICP has been sort of hit or miss when I tried it. I ditched it because of too many issues.
Just flashed RR again today for the first time since February and it seems good so far. Definitely has some camera lag but it doesn't actually freeze completely.
No ROM on this phone will get good battery life, btw, unless you spend every waking moment trying to save power. Expect 2.5-3.5 SoT max in reality. People will say crazy high numbers sometimes but those are anomalies. Everything is dark themable with Substratum, but Validus by Ground Zero Roms has a built in dark theme. You can turn off animations in dev options on any ROM. I have mine at 0.4 right now. You can set it to 0.0 though if you want.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Get this daily on validus. But in exchange for less battery life I would say dirty uncicorns is pretty darn good now. The newest builds fixed so much, and the audio is finally working just fine now. Only but I found now is the toggle in the quick settings for the flashlight won't work after a reboot until you hit the edit icon and then try it again. Other than that dirty uncicorns is good. Validus is great but the only problem I had was audio was a little weird.

Curlyfry2121 said:
Get this daily on validus. But in exchange for less battery life I would say dirty uncicorns is pretty darn good now. The newest builds fixed so much, and the audio is finally working just fine now. Only but I found now is the toggle in the quick settings for the flashlight won't work after a reboot until you hit the edit icon and then try it again. Other than that dirty uncicorns is good. Validus is great but the only problem I had was audio was a little weird.
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Click to collapse
To be honest, almost no one gets that battery life. I was on Validus for about 2 months and never broke 3.5 SoT, not even close actually. But I'm glad someone is!

xgerryx said:
To be honest, almost no one gets that battery life. I was on Validus for about 2 months and never broke 3.5 SoT, not even close actually. But I'm glad someone is!
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Click to collapse
Haha yeah, it's because I know what to tweak on the phone after a year of use. Wish the next Moto x gets that battery life for everyone, then battery life for people who tweak the kernel and get 2 days worth. And btw Omni Ron is also very good. It's simple, not full of customization but it's pretty ok for an aosp Rom funny how it's aosp but has a lineage kernel like ok then ?

The stock rom!
This might not be what you wanted to hear, but the stock rom meets most of your criteria better than most. Even tethering works out-of-the-box, which is something I've never seen on a stock software release before. If you miss tweakability and bonus features, then there's always root, custom kernels, and the Xposed Framework to fill the gaps. Plus, all of the hardware features and sensors can be utilized to their fullest.