[Galaxy S III Android Development] huzzam:
My experiences with Weekly 1

For those interested, here are my findings with Weekly 1:

0. I installed as dirty install over Beta 8 + Boeffla kernel 6a. Wiped cache/dalvik before & after installing. Beta 8 was a clean install on a full wipe (two days ago; that's why I didn't want to do another full wipe). I use Nova Launcher (donate version) fwiw. The only root apps I have installed are: Titanium Backup, Better Battery Stats, Greenify (only for Facebook), and finally Boeffla Config (after I installed Boeffla kernel).

1. With the stock kernel it was incredibly unstable. Many apps would force stop. I couldn't type a complete message in either FB Messenger or WhatsApp before the app would close. Chrome could barely load a page. The Facebook app would try to open, show a blank white screen for about a minute, finally start to display something, then crash & start over, back to the white screen for another minute, etc... Google Music & YouTube both quit mid-song several times, even as the frontmost app. I'm not sure why it was like this, but I had the intuition that it was partly a memory issue, that things were actually getting killed even while I used them.

2. With Boeffla kernel 6a, things are *much* better. Very few crashed apps in the last 18 hours, and things start much more quickly (though not as fast as under Archidroid 3). I'm running with zRam (500mb/4 processes/swappiness 90), and I think that in particular is making a huge difference. (For those interested, other settings I'm using & getting good results with: zzmoove/battery yank, row scheduler for both int/ext sd, various sound & display tweaks to taste)

3. Titanium Backup cannot restore any packages (under either kernel; this was also true on Beta 8). It can restore data, but not apps. I have the donate version, and yes, I have enabled "allow installing from unknown sources" in the Security options. I can manually install apks which I download, but Titanium can't install anything. Worked fine under KitKat (Archidroid 3 most recently).

4. While idle battery drain is much better than KitKat (and those blasted Nlp wakelocks), battery drain while in use is very, very fast. I'm losing 18.4%/hour, according to Better Battery Stats, with 55% of the unplugged time with screen on (1:39). Estimated total use time is about 6 hours. For comparison, under Archidroid 3 — and blocking the Nlp wakelocks from Google Play Services — I was getting about 19 hours of normal use on this battery. Today I was reading a mostly-text webpage (outside, full brightness) for five minutes, and lost 6% of my battery. I didn't see anything very strange in Better Battery Stats, though I notice that Screen On & Awake are very different: 1:39 vs 2:32, respectively. No partial wakelocks over 0%; Kernel Wakelocks have PowerManagerService at 25%, multipdp at 6%, secril_fd-interface at 4%, and then a few things at 1-3%.

5. Overall, even now it's pretty laggy, when starting up apps or switching between them. Some example startup times (after not using each app for a while, so they aren't in memory): WhatsApp 10 seconds; FB Messenger 12 seconds; Google Maps 10 seconds; Facebook 15 seconds; Chrome Beta 7 seconds; Nova Launcher (pressing the home button after using another app for a while): 5 seconds; Google Music 7 seconds; Instagram 3 seconds. Google Camera never (this time :( )

Anyway, I thank all the developers so much for all your hard work! I'm amazed at how quickly this has become a usable ROM! (I first tried alpha 4, which I wouldn't exactly call "usable" ;) but that was just a few weeks ago!)

If there's anything I can do to provide you (the developers) with more information for troubleshooting, please let me know.

~peter in istanbul