[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] JonW434:
It's all a bit of a blur, but going from memory.. it was 4 tokens or whatever their unit is. Which was 4 Euro, which converted to around $7AUD for bootlocker code (which I then unlocked with adb in command prompt) and the same price for network unlock as my service provider is on the same network as Vodafone. I just wanted to confirm that it worked (for the future etc) but won't be doing that again for the second phone.

In terms of the other parts of the post.. thanks for that huge post, it was like a gold mine of info. Just within minutes of trying those ideas, solved 3 or more problems for me. Especially the root explorer problem I had. That was an instant fix. Similar thing with getting the apps to migrate over. Once I saw those things you said with migrate data, and all of that other stuff.. my apps were integrated within a few mins. I was able to get 0.9 to 1g free on the system drive. And have 600-900mb of apps on the external drive. Woohoo!

There was one problem, maybe you can help with this.. I thought all was good until a restart and then some shortcut icons disappeared on the main front page thing. In Windows it's called desktop, but I forget what it's called in android. I tried lots of things and have said semi success but it seems to be coming back on and off again. In an annoying random way.

What I did experiment a lot with in the last few hours is App2SD Pro, and it's whole bunch of features. For example boosting SD card speeds (mixed results). But importantly.. adding a fat32 partition to the mix.. and having 50GB for integrated and 9 or so for fat32, and putting ROMS on there for TWRP to be able to see. So that if .zips are required in recovery, TWRP can read them without needing an SD card swap. I did try the swap a few days ago (with a spare fat32 32GB portable SD card) and it worked ok, but it's annoying. This worked ok. Other than the problem above with the missing icons. Is there any downside to doing this, in terms of having two partitions off of one SD card when it's adoptive and integrated?

Has portable vs adoptive ever been benchmarked against each other? Because integrated has a lot of downsides, although I understand it's partition is the faster more ideal one. F2FS? It seems like with App2SD both could work. I can confirm that the partitioner in App2SD for adoptive works fine. It was actually quite straight forward and relatively simple compared to most other things I've tried in the last few days.

In terms of what helped most with the missing icons was to do a full format of the SD carrd, delete all the user apps and reinstall them from scratch onto the adoptive partition (from scratch). It worked pretty well and survived multiple restarts until I turned the phone off for an hour. Upon booting into system, a few icons started disappearing again. Is there a more long term fix for this? I've read that unmounting and remounting might help, but I didn't get a chance to try it before formatting again. Because I think I wanna have another go at trying to get Lineage OS (the latest updates from here) on there. Using the TWRP unofficial version that you mentioned.

I've done a lot of benchmarking in the last day or two.. and am keen to see stock vs OctOS vs LineageOS. Not because performance matters that much in a phone (the 3D Mark score is bad for all options), but more from a curiousity point of view.. in terms of temps, relative performance, and battery life etc.

I understood most things in your post but there were a couple things that I didn't understand right away, I need to go further in depth, but might come back to it at a later point. Thanks for that awesome post, it was very rich with useful info. I will refer back to it many times.

In terms of the sound volume thing, I haven't actually had any bugs. Pretty much haven't had anything wrong at all actually, more just tweaking for fun before trying to commit to a final method/option for a long term use (and then doing that a second time for the other phone). But in general, I don't even like the volume of the phone at stock. The ringtones stock are pretty loud but the voice can sometimes be a bit low.. and ideally, I'd like to get near the point of clipping and back off a tad.. so that 70% is the ideal volume, but there's additional headroom for those noisey situations when there is traffic around or background noise. With OctOS, even in a quiet room nothing is very loud. With stock phone, it's a tad better but not exactly loud. I haven't tried any of that yet, but will get around to it eventually. It's just cool that root access gives you these options, so I figure I may as well try it out and see how far away from clipping it is currently.

In terms of SD card cache size, I did play around for an hour or so, and it seemed like every number has pros and cons depending on which size files you are transferring. Anywhere between 512 and 2048 seemed to give good results in different situations. Is there a stock setting that everyone here uses, or does everyone just leave it alone and not worry about it? Pretty sure 128 is stock? I also noticed some strange things with read and writes (the speed ratio between them). The card I got was Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB and in some cases the read speed tanked, while the write speed was still pretty strong, which I am not famililar with. It's usually the opposite. In Windows with usb3.0 hub, I was getting around 80mb/s for both read and write. With USB2.0, I was getting around 40mb. I'm getting between 20-40mbs when using it as adoptive drive. I haven't tested portable properly (full 100% portable) but it'd probably be similar. Oh that was the other thing about the fat 32 partition, it made it easier to benchmark the drive. With the adoptive part being denied access with everything except Passmark benchmarking app. That 8-10GB fat32 partition I added was able to be tested by everything. Regardless of the cache setting, I noticed in short bursts it could go from 30-60mb but after 5 secs or so, something in the phone would bog down. The I/O controller, or the CPU itself.. not sure. But long sustained writes, 22mb/s was a good outcome. With wrong settings it could be as low as 10mb/s. Long story short, with the right settings the speed can be improved a tad.. but it's heavily bottlenecked by the phone itself. I plan to use this card with my future phone though and the speed should payoff a bit better in that future situation. In the meantime, it's just fun to learn about how all this stuff works.

I've pretty much learned everything I can with OctOS (for now) and I could see myself using this but wanna give LineageOS a go.. hopefully I can have some luck and get it working. In terms of OctOS, I did have a high temp problem in the last 24 hours but it's strange because for 2 days, there was no issue. I haven't figured out what caused it (it could be 2 or 3 different things) but might come back to that later. But yeah.. I'm ready to give another ROM a go and do a comparison.. assuming I can get it loaded. Fingers crossed.

edit - When the right time comes.. this.. --> NANDroid backup.. definately. :)

---------- Post added at 01:10 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:51 AM ----------

Just a quick note on this.. that few lines helped immediately. I'm pretty sure I did choose Adopted but nothing really happened. And a strage thing happened, when I first tried to migrate.. it was wanting to migrate the external onto the internal and then failing, saying not enough space (it needed 1.9GB extra space or something silly like that). When I did an erase and format/new partition with App2SD.. this problem never returned and everything worked as intended from then until now. I did have to migrate all my apps over one at a time manually though. When I migrate it only ever does 200kb at a time (no apps). But all new installed apps appear on the external, so that combined with manually moving the other ones over, I was pretty happy with that. The developer option was another big thing. As far as I know, this removes the need to use any "SDfix" type of thing. That side of things is pretty much solved now. Thanks to those few lines I quoted. That post you quoted was another great chunk of info though.

In terms of GAPPS, I opted for Pico very early on and it's been great so far. And I just add the others manually through Play Store (giving full user control over them) and there's only 4 or 5 that I get, so it's pretty easy and simple. Those others can handle being on the external drive fine. In terms of converting system apps back and forth, I get warnings in App2SD that it will alter the partition, do I want to proceed. Should I just ignore that and it's harmless? For example, I'd like to make ES File Explorer, Root Checker and a few others system apps. While making everything Google non system (except for Google Play Services and Play Store).