[Galaxy S 4 Mini General] XXchrisXX:
cm-11-20150402-UNOFFICIAL-serranoltexx.zip

Hello to all of you,

I stumpled over this thread (to be exactly the developer thread about CM11 for the S4 mini LTE, created by arco68, but I have to post here, because I am lacking 10 posts) by accident, because a friend of me searched for a CM11 Nightly, for flashing it to his S4 mini LTE, but downloaded the wrong file (CM12 nightly) and reported me that he has "bricked" his device. So he told me, not to find any Cm11 Nightlys anymore and that the last "stable" release, would be a nearly 4 moths old M-Release (the M12). Because I was interested in investigating this, I searched for answers and could not believe, what I read here (some examples quoted above from the other thread).

It's interesting to read all of this, some moths after my try, to be critical about Cyanogenmod/Cyanogen Inc. (The people who are controlling nearly all about it and are making a lot money, not the contributors and maintainers who are working hard most of the time) which was pointless at this time, it seemed.

To clarify the situation: It's very likely, that CM11 for the I9195 is not getting any Nightlys anymore, because there are CM12 Nightlys. It seems that with introducing weekly CM11 Nightlys, for devices which are lacking official CM12 support, they also have completely canceled further CM11 Nightlys, for devices which are official supported by CM12. The problem about this and CyanogenMod/Cyanogen Inc. is that there is nearly no clear communication with their users and it seems not even with their maintainers, otherwise arco68 should have known what's going on. I have also read somewhere, that even people involved into the CM team, are unclear if there will be a CM11 M13/Stable anyway, for devices which are getting a CM12 M1 build. It's no accident, that they plan to "allow" everyone to update to CM12 from a working CM11 build. Maybe they need some big figures for their users statistics, to get some more investors/sponsors? I don't know for sure.

The really bad about this all is: It is one thing, to instantly more or less "discontinue" CM11 in favor of CM12, because they need to make money and let the users, who believed in them, staying in the rain with something uncompleted, without any real and clear communication, about what "could" be going on in the next moths. They don't need to announce a ETA, but what's going on now is absolutely out of question. They have reached the point, where they PREVENT the updates and builds from the users, it seems. In order to be fair I have to mention, that there are still changes in CM11, which is good, after knowing their initial plan was, to end the CM11 support fully before 2015. This changes are not that much, but after 4 moths, they are worth an update and it's nice, CM is still working on it. It's also "nice" to know, that for the S4 mini LTE users, in this way, there will be no possibility, to report bugs, introduced within this 4 months, because the M12 build doesn't include them and if there will be a M13 build, it will be the final one, including all his bugs.

To make all of this much more ironic, I have looked at the device specific repositories for the S4 mini, which are maintained by arco68 and found out, that he is making an absolutely awesome job there, with updating the CM11 and CM12 branch nearly equally. This is something what's not every maintainer is doing actually. So for that point of view, he is really doing anything right and you should be glad to have such a motivated maintainer. Also F4k (which is maintaining here at XDA his custom kernel for the S4 mini, is still supporting CM10.2, which is also exemplary!). So there was absolutely no need, to cancel the CM11 Nightlys for the I9195.

So to be honest: The company behind CM is making millions of dollars, if they justify their decision to need more drive space or resources on their build hosts, this can be nothing more as a lie or some joke or there is something completely going wrong with their organization or they (the powerful persons behind CM) really don't care anymore about their users. But what seems strange to me, is the fact that nobody of the developers with the knowledge around here or other people have build an unofficial build of the latest CM11 sources for this people here.

Because I felt really pity for the people, sticking on their old builds here for moths, I have quickly done what I was talking about and build an unofficial CM11 Nightly, which has all changes included, until one day ago. There are some device and kernel specific changes, made by arco68 and a bunch of bugfixes and other changes, made by the CM team and their contributors included. There has nothing changed, except the fact, that I used the open source variant of JDK 7 for the java part. But my friend is running this build since compiling and there are no faults. In addition to that, I used the chance and build a fresh build of philz advanced touch recovery 6.59.0 (the latest one) based on his and CMs latest git repositories (but without any additional features like F2FS or something). Also this version has been tested and seems to run very well. To make this completely, I have uploaded my personal, latest, minimal Gapps packages for Kitkat, for 240DPI devices, (your S4 mini) in four different versions. One minimal without search, one minimal with search, one minimal without search & without any sync & backup apps/libraries included (for the people who care about privacy) and one minimal version with search app included but without any sync & backup services again. Which I am using for some friends and never had any problems with. (I also read that the fitting Gapps are down) So even if CM doesn't care, there are people who care about some things and it would be much easier, if we could do this together, if pro or not.

I know the feeling, to be "forgotten", at the time back, when CM never build one final build for my device, because of some pointless reasons. To this time, someone did the same, what I did now, he build an unofficial one for this people and I was so happy about that. This here is something like a try, to give something back to the people, who seem to be in the same situation, as I was in the past.

Sadly there is one problem: Like I wrote, I am lacking ten posts, so there I am not allowed, to post any links here. So I hope it is okay, to write how to find my builds. Search for "xxchrisxx" at androidfilehost. There you will find "Galaxy s4 mini" and here you will find all you need. Also there is uploaded the latest version of the modem (because I read in the other thread, that some are having problems with their telephony), so you can try that also if you like and can look for more there. I will try to build an further version also in some weeks, I cant promise. But I will promise you (if nothing bad will happen), that I will build a final M13 nightly for you, if CM would really won't build one by themselves. So you can stay on your beloved CM11 like I do. If there are any problems or something other, you can find my email address at androidfilehost. I hope you are happy about this and it would be nice, if someone could link from the i9195 development thread to here, so that the other users also can find the build. :highfive: