Owners of the 2013 Galaxy S4 can now breathe a little sigh of relief, as they can take a look at Android 5.0 Lollipop without having to shell out for a new phone. There’s a leaked Lollipop ROM available for the ageing handset, at version 5.0.1, and as its a leak (not a cobbled together thing from XDA) you can flash it on your device using ODIN and it’ll work pretty well.
Being a leak, there’s probably a couple of untested features or bugs present, but what ROM doesn’t have these? If your phone carks it, it’s your fault for flashing an unofficial software to it, but that said, if you’re game, give it a go and see what you find.
Compatibility wise, it looks like this is only for the i9500 model, which is the international unlocked variant; carrier specific models with slightly different versioning codes may not be supported by this ROM, and so flashing it either won’t work, or may break things.
XDA Developers have the download link, so check it out and let us know what you find.
I got the Galaxy S4 and have been running the unofficial cyangen 12 5.0.2 lollipop build on it for about a month now and its is AWESOME. It has given the phone a breath of life again. Extremely fast, no problems with power consumption and it’s all buttery smooth. I was going to get a new phone, possibly the nexus 6, but I’m going to wait a lot longer now until I get my new phone whatever that may be.
Hopefully the Samsung touch wiz ui includes the ability to delete/disable unnecessary apps, but I doubt it.
>no problems with the power consumption
Two people in my household own an S4, and I used to own one as well, and power consumption was definitely not an issue at all. I don’t know how people come across these issues.
What an amazing turn of events! Look at how nice the UI is! It’s like they’ve changed everything? How does samsung keep doing this? No wander i’ve stayed with them for this long!
*Sarcasm*
Plain Jane look as always, Bring me GPE lollipop and i’d eat it all up.
To be fair though, they are on a winner on the slide left and slide right in messages or phone app, But that’s about it.
Z3/Z4 compact for me.