[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S 4 General] robinsonj:
Not Broken

So I wouldn't normally post to say "Everything's normal", but in reading through for the last few weeks I think SOMEBODY has to...

If you read the posts on 4.4.2 for the i337 and i337M it looks like a beta ROM with broken wifi, broken external storage, broken camera...

There must be some common factor for so many to be having problems but i just want to reassure not everyone has them so they must be fixable.

Here is what I did:

Made 2 TiBu backups on my external card... One regular and one "update.zip" just in case

ODINed the leak

Booted up

Entered my initial setup information and had a "look around" but noticed Play Store was trying to download all my apps, so i killed all of those except TiBu and it's license. (waited for it to finish those)

Shut down

Rooted (ODIN and CF auto root)

Booted up again

Stopped all the Play Store downloads again...

Opened TiBu and of course agreed to it's suggestion to restore my Android ID to its original

Did a TiBu restore of all my apps and data

Opened Application Manager and moved all the apps it was willing to SD Card (I will revisit this lower down!**)

Verified that it had restored cwm... it had.

Ran CWM, which notified me that there was an upgrade to my custom recovery... (since a flash almost certainly removed my recovery I accepted the download and let flash the touch version

Reboot again

Tried out some of the CWM functions to verify it was running, just stuff like fix permissions, delete cache... when I was satisfied with that I told it to boot me into recovery.

In recovery I verified some stuff was working (mount, unmount...)

Boot again

Checked that everything was working...it was (except it kep telling me about some problem with Google+) but seemed a little slow

Deleted and re-installed Gogle+ (this worked... I guess a KitKat specific one was required and my earlier restore overwrote with the JB one)

Checked the APN... it was definitely changed to Bell's APN. Since Virgin uses Bell towers it wasn't broken but there are some differences so I made a new Virgin one and deleted the original... this seemed to help

At this point it was midnight so I crashed and then used the phone as it was for a full day, no problems but the battery did go down more than before.

After work I froze and deleted all the Bell bloat... that gave more room.

Next I froze everything with Ant, Knox, or Enterprise in it's name as well as the Samsung bloat I do not use S Health, Samsung Hub, ChatOn, all of the print services... There are some like Group Play, AllShare, and a few others I do use so I wasn't overly aggressive just in case.

Another full day to verify I hadn't broken anything

At this point I read several threads about people being unable to use their external cards for anything but media files... made me curious.

If you want to do this part you should have a bit of knowledge... otherwise you could really screw it up, just leave it alone!

**Opened Root Explorer and verified that the "SD Card" my apps had been moved to was the internal one.

Did some more research on here and found that it was controlled by an environment variable, so I edited the file (as per instruction I found on "Android Headlines" http://www.androidheadlines.com/2014/02/galaxy-s4-note-3-kitkat-sd-card-update-issue-youre-not-alone-root-fix-inside.html

Moved all the apps I had earlier told to "move to SD Card" back to "Device"

Found as many references as possible to SD Card in the phone (TiBu, Root Explorer, CWM, camera, anything that ahs the ability to save files really) and directed them that SD Card means the path /storage/extSdCard.

Another reboot

Now moved as many apps as it would let me to SD Card... YES they went to the external

I deleted the apps I had frozen earlier

I used Root Explorer to delete a ton of duplicate folder names to avoid confusion... DCIM, Music, Movies, Documents, Download, Pictures, backups... from everywhere EXCEPT the external card. (note that I manually moved any files that were in those folders to the same folder name on the external)

I think my phone is about as optimized as I need it to be. I haven't removed any of the S4 functionality or features that I use, and there's a bit more memory headroom...

Sorry for the long saga but I wanted to post up something that by evidence (my working phone) does work that might just help someone identify something they overlooked that has caused their issues.

Jamie