I have a galaxy S4 with Verizon. I don't mind touchwiz. My question is what advantages would I get by rooting and putting stock android on it? Will it be faster? What features will I get to offset the touchwiz features that I will lose? Also, I have a Mac. Can anyone post instructions and links to the files I would need to download?
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Put Stock Android on Galaxy S4?
- Thread starter SexyBeast
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Check out XDA's Verizon S4 forums here and read this for a general overview on rooting and ROMs.
Only downside with using OS X is that most of the "one-click" GUI solutions only exist on Windows - which leaves you to manually unlock the bootloader and flash custom recoveries via Terminal. May sound scary if you're a newbie, but there are plenty of guides out there.
Only downside with using OS X is that most of the "one-click" GUI solutions only exist on Windows - which leaves you to manually unlock the bootloader and flash custom recoveries via Terminal. May sound scary if you're a newbie, but there are plenty of guides out there.
If you are on the latest update on the Verizon version then unfortunately you are out of luck until they figure out a way to work around the locked bootloader.
I felt the same way about Sense 5.0 on my HTC One. I unlocked my bootloader and then downloaded a few "Google Edition" ROMs. I found one I liked and used it for about a month. Then I came across the AOSP ROMs and was just blown away with what you could do. I've been running one based off of Cyanogenmod 10.2 for a couple weeks now and it's great.
I also suggest going to XDA and doing some reading.
I also suggest going to XDA and doing some reading.
I have tried several roms, Pure stock and everything. Currently I have a stock rom installed, with nova launcher and all animations set to 0.5 and I am perfectly satisfied.
I use the camera a lot and Sammy's camera is way better than GE roms. Smart stay is also really useful.
Standby times are great and I normally get 4 hours of screen (16 hours standby) with Dropbox, gmail, yahoo sync. Wifi, lte open all day and lte signal is really poor here.
Currently I am on 41 hours on battery, 2.51 hours on screen and 4% left.
I use the camera a lot and Sammy's camera is way better than GE roms. Smart stay is also really useful.
Standby times are great and I normally get 4 hours of screen (16 hours standby) with Dropbox, gmail, yahoo sync. Wifi, lte open all day and lte signal is really poor here.
Currently I am on 41 hours on battery, 2.51 hours on screen and 4% left.
This. I suppose you might try something crazy like getting a trial version of VMWare Fusion and then a Windows 7 IE developer image and try to run Odin (the software required for flashing ROMs) on that setup.
The Android developer community seems very Windows-centric. I tried looking into the OSX software available but it seems there are no Heimdall (Mac equivalent of Odin) compatible packages distributed. The XDA forums are even worse reading than InsanelyMac's Hackintosh stuff. Those XDA guys reeeeally love their brackets and superlong thread titles. The jargon alone can be pretty intimidating at first.
If like me you don't mind Touchwiz, then you could just try running the Truly Clean script on it. It gets rid of all the crappy Samsung apps but leaves the ones that matter like the camera app. Haven't tried it long enough to notice any real performance difference but at least it gives me some peace of mind.
Personally I wouldn't do it. From everything I read - stock Android is very vanilla and you would lose many hardware features because stock Android wouldn't be taking advantage of them. You'd also lose a lot of the camera functionality that makes Samsung's skin worthwhile.
Better (from what I've read) to flash a rom that has bloatware removed
Better (from what I've read) to flash a rom that has bloatware removed
After reading OP's post yesterday, I decided to make the leap from SHOstock on my S4 to Task's AOKP. Task's ROMs have always worked well for me in the past, so I thought it would be a good choice.
Unfortunately, and this isn't necessarily Task's fault...on the leaked 4.3 that all the ROM devs are using, notifications for third-party apps are EXTREMELY hit and miss. The only notifications I could get were Gmail. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tapatalk just wouldn't push notifications at all.
The most frustrating part is that you can't really figure this out until you've gone through 2 hours of setup time after flashing the phone. I searched high and low for anything to tell me why this happened and apparently 4.3 has some different way of doing push notifications. I believe it will only be fixed once the app makers update the apps.
I searched through both the AOKP help thread and dev thread on XDA, and the only reference to push notifications was one post of someone mentioning the problem. In his typical ******* way, Task's response? Fully wipe and reinstall. Really? For something that should be mentioned in the OP of the dev thread? I've got an idea...why don't the devs stop jumping the gun and using leaks of ROMs as their base and instead use the older official firmware where you know things work? Is it worth it when there's little to no difference between 4.2.2 and 4.3? No.
So I restored my nandroid of SHOstock this morning and all's well. While I love using AOKP, you'll always run into these stupid bugs that are completely preventable.
Unfortunately, and this isn't necessarily Task's fault...on the leaked 4.3 that all the ROM devs are using, notifications for third-party apps are EXTREMELY hit and miss. The only notifications I could get were Gmail. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tapatalk just wouldn't push notifications at all.
The most frustrating part is that you can't really figure this out until you've gone through 2 hours of setup time after flashing the phone. I searched high and low for anything to tell me why this happened and apparently 4.3 has some different way of doing push notifications. I believe it will only be fixed once the app makers update the apps.
I searched through both the AOKP help thread and dev thread on XDA, and the only reference to push notifications was one post of someone mentioning the problem. In his typical ******* way, Task's response? Fully wipe and reinstall. Really? For something that should be mentioned in the OP of the dev thread? I've got an idea...why don't the devs stop jumping the gun and using leaks of ROMs as their base and instead use the older official firmware where you know things work? Is it worth it when there's little to no difference between 4.2.2 and 4.3? No.
So I restored my nandroid of SHOstock this morning and all's well. While I love using AOKP, you'll always run into these stupid bugs that are completely preventable.
4.3 has a slew of problems and that's even on the official GE devices. Notification light being erratic, no touch to focus in the camera if HDR is enabled resulting in blurry photos etc.... Seriously they got 4.3 out quick but they really should have tested it more.
If your S4 is updated to the "ME7" software, there is no way to install custom ROMs...you can only root.