[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
Hello [MENTION=838017]sherri[/MENTION],

* See? I told you I would need time for you, Sherri. You are special! :angel:

Why do I want to rom so much? Oh, I don't really know what I want, Sherri. I have not bought any cool toys for like, almost the past 3-5 years! No cool phone, no new car, no new *****in' computer or laptop, camera, hobby stuff, or any real "Boy Toys". (I did build "The Computer to Die For" when I had cash with the house and I have NO problems with it, for sure!) I live in a small home alone and pay every bill that comes in and since I can't work now, I have to do all this on disability and you know, it is never enough to get through the month. It is taking time, finally I am getting the hang of this budget and how to manage it, but have a ways to go. Since I did not have money for toys, I didn't buy any and this new Moto-X Pure is like all the birthdays I missed for the last several years all at once in one nice present!

So I have been playing with this thing constantly. First day I had the bootloader unlocked, rooted, installed TWRP, and put back the nice boot animation. (You get this stupid warning screen at every boot when unlocked until you put back the original boot animation.) So Xposed modules, setting it up, playing and configuring a bit too much (I already wrecked this one to restore, and a couple of times with conflicting Xposed modules.) and now things are pretty good.

But being a rooter and rommer for the past several years, it is hard to "sit on the bleachers" and watch everyone else play. I miss all of the cool settings and features of a custom rom like CyanogenMod. I have no performance settings, no launcher settings, no themes or theme engine, or any of the cool stuff from the custom roms and now I think what I have is probably the best I can have. The stock Moto-X rom is pretty good for stock. No ads or Verizon bloat. Some of the Motorola stuff is actually quite good, I love Moto Voice Assist. Xposed modules give me back "some" of the custom stuff I miss but not all. I tried to use Gravity Box to give me another row and column on the desktop icon grid and totally blew out the systemui for the phone and it took a restore because I did so much stuff to the phone, I had not idea of what I did wrong. The screen would blink on and off, every second, and you could not stop it. The TWRP restore did fix this and I found out later what it was as I was putting stuff back. Once I added the rows and columns, I rebooted to test it and that is where i got the blinky screen. Now I just uncheck that feature between blinks, reboot and wipe dalik & cache, and reboot, cleans it right up. But I have to be careful with Xposed. Most or many modules work with Lollipop, but not all, and there is an XDA thread for this, HERE.

So I am looking into roms but just bookmarking them for when things are settled. So far every Lollipop rom has something wrong with it, but they are getting there. Better to keep stock now with everything working than messing around with a rom and having something not work that I need. [MENTION=3305649]OldBaldy[/MENTION] got it right, he does not hanker to rom now with everything working in his phone and he has it setup pretty good. That sounds about right for now. :)

But when good roms become available, I will probably install one. I would really *love* to see a CM12 rom on this but no one is even working on it, at all. And CM got kind of crappy with CM11 near the end. After a year and a half of development and all of us waiting for that final, stable snapshot and officially stable rom, it never came! We only got that last CM11 rom because [MENTION=3457922]stargo[/MENTION] would not let it go and kept working on it, and, he did a great job! Finished the rom completely and fixed stage fright and polished it up all around the edges and finally, it was done. They are not working on a rom for the Moto-X Pure and I for the life of me cannot figure out why. This phone is a rommer's dream!

So with Xposed, stock, and Lollipop, I am pretty good for now. I do bookmark potential roms but I am not ready to install any.

As far as "The RAZR will never get Kitkat", it is already here! That last 2015-09-01 snapshot is it. Everything works, nothing is broken, and they are done with it. As far as the Razr being so slow, well, that is outdated hardware with new, resource hungry apps. Not a lot you can do about it but to do as we all did, remove stuff we don't want, Greenify *everything* that is not necessary to run, update and add any new stuff to Greenify, and reboot once in a while, wipe dalvik and cache. Slow? Yes. Not usable or cannot multitask a little? No, you can, I was still streaming music to Bluetooth audio, using Navigation, and a text or phone call with all that is pretty rough, but doable, maybe? :p

I could not afford this phone but a few things happened all at once to make that happen. Verizon was jacking up unlimited this month and I already pay 2-3X what my friends do for the exact same phone use every month including data. Nice to have unlimited data, not nice paying for it and never really getting my money's worth because I just do not use that much. So, ditching unlimited and saving $60/Mo. helps a LOT with the pure, that savings alone will pay for it in like 8 months or so. I pay for emergencies like car problems, doctor, or anything else, some way, some how. Since the Razr is really so darned slow I could make that an emergency and it is valid for me since it is my only phone. My friend is a bit affluent and when I told her I really need to get the $450 (32 Gb model) for this phone, she went right to Amazon and put it on her credit card, on the spot. I pay her back slowly, last time she loaned me that much I paid it back in maybe 8 or 9 months, no interest of course. And I get "stuff" that she wants, so that I can use for currency to pay her back. Win win for everyone! And, I got the phone. :D

Xposed does let you pimp out your phone, a lot, but not quite the same as a custom rom. Some things you cannot change, even with Xposed, like when I changed my desktop grid. But it is good enough. I have AdAway and all that, the Moto-X runs really really well on it's own so performance tools would probably do more harm than good right now anyway. I don't get all the features of a custom rom like the Theme Engine, but that is just Eye Candy Overhead any way.

I didn't have a backup of the stock rom and did not want to wait so I just made a backup as soon as I had it setup. Not far from original but, I did not think to do that before installing Xposed. Lollipop Xposed is still not fully developed and is in Alpha stage so installing it means flashing a special zip file first, then installing a special installer apk. Same as before, but with that kind of installation, the Uninstall button is grayed out so you cannot just "Uninstall Xposed". The only for sure way to get rid of it is to restore a backup from TWRP and I did not know this at the time, so I cannot take it out. There is an uninstall file to flash but it did not work for me. Now both you and I know better, in Lollipop, make a backup of your nearly stock rom first thing, before installing Xposed! You need root and recovery to make the backup so how can you make a pure and clean backup of the stock rom? :confused:

My Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, 10.1 is still on CM11 and just slowed down, horribly. I could not understand why at first, then looking at uptime I see the numbers are in 3 digits and I wiped dalvik & cache, then went back into Greenify to find new apps and things not being put into hibernation. Once done, it runs okay now. I tell you, I used Pandora one day going to the store, exited out, and the next day was checking Running Apps and found Pandora running! WTF? I put it in the Greenify list and that bad boy sleeps now alright. Funny thing is that it would not Greenify along with Google. I tapped the help button on this and found that Greenify will not put apps to sleep in the current state "Working". I could insist it sleep and I did, then checked Experimental donation menu and put back all of the check marks like "Block App State Abuse"

(This is how Pandora gets around Greenify!)

and "Greenify system apps" just in the event that I want to add any, I didn't and allowed Google to run since it is a legitimate system app. Why the hell would Pandora never exit and run forever? Because Pandora apparently "wants" it to run forever, push ads, or whatever. They force the app to run at all times in the "Working" state and do not allow it to drop to idle. Pandora really does use "App State Abuse", a perfect example for all to see. There is simply no reason at all to have it run when not listening to music. Everything in the Donation Experimental menu I use except that Alpha version of Deep Sleep. Don't really need that one and it can cause issues like not allowing linked apps to open when they should.

Hey, did you check out the Brain on it! physics game? You have kids and this is an academic subject, physics. And, it is fun and has a feather light footprint, will not slow down the Razr at all! Everybody can figure out physics, you need a lever to open that, draw one. A ramp maybe? Swipe one with finger and see if it works. The gravity physics in Brain on it! are very good and accurate. :)

I think that is it, Sherri. Oh gosh, this post is getting WAY long, time to end it now. 'night and good to hear from you again! :cowboy: