[Galaxy S III General] eliash:
my i9300

Hi, I was frustratingly browsing XDA,

to find where can I ask what the heck I should do now,

I have such a great phone - i9300, extremely good HW - especially for a phone - I actually see servers at my day to day work with crappier HW.

I spent tons of money on the phone - I don't remember if it was 500$ or 600$, but I bought it when it was new - couldn't get the Nexus 4, so I got this one.

Bought it after I was really happy with the SGS1 - it got really slow on HW, I was using CM roms in order to keep in good use, I was really happy, old phone, new ROM, phone works awesome even compared to new phones at that time - for example most of the SGS2 that I encoutered at that time, where significantly slower than my old SGS1.

I use my phone for: calls, SMS, whatsapp, navigation, music, browsing(mostly 9gag :D), and camera, the phone does everything really good, so why should I dump my 500$ and invest 500$ more in order to get a newer HW + SW to do the same things, I don't see the point in that.

Awesome phone, As I can see it, I can keep using it for many more years without replacing it.

Back to why I'm so frustrated,

First thing I did when I bought the phone, was to dump the samsung crappy rom and install CM - don't remember what android version they ran at the time, but they were much closer to the android edge than samsung.

The phone was awesome - I stuck with CM nightlies, always flashing the latest nightly - right, sometimes I encountered a small bug, but it was excellent for day to day use (even if for long time I couldn't focus my camera while the flash is activated), I was happy.

And then new version of Android were released, first 4.3, then 4.4, in addition, CM decided that they are not sticking with AOSP, they want their own stuff - their own music player, their own camera their own gallery.

I can understand CM guys - they invest huge amount of resources(money+time) in order to develop the best (as I can see at the moment) non HW manufacture OS, let me clarify - samsung, HTC, others, those are huge companies, with huge amount of resources, they take AOSP and adapt it, make tons of money from selling android phones.

CM began small, couple of people want AOSP on their phones - and now they reached the place where HW manufactures want CM to be the original OS that shipped with their phones - great achievement!

But what about us? about the simple people that just want AOSP on their phone?

Why I want AOSP - because I believe that even that google taking over my life - everything is done via google, I still like their products.

So I'm still with CM 10.1 - running android 4.2.2, and I think about the days when I was running the closest thing to AOSP that there is, it was stable enough for day to day use and it was the edge of the technology.

Now I spend my time looking for the next closest to AOSP ROM, that will be stable enough and on the other hand the edge of technology.

but most of ROMs port from CM, so they are out of the picture, many of the rest decided that they can do things better than google - so they changing the AOSP ROM.

And Samsung are releasing new versions of android, still with their Samsung crap, and not exposing the essential drivers.

So why I have not changed my phone yet? because I don't see a reason to throw away perfectly good 500$.

Frustrated CM user(sorry for the off-topic)