[Motorola Droid 4] dd350:
SlimKat is a V4 (KitKat) ROM by SlimRoms. It's based on AOSP 4.4.4. Its latest release, build 9.0, was Dec-22 2014 with a 3.0.8 kernel.

Its disadvanatges are that it is no longer supported by the Slim dev team; no custom overclock kernels exist for it; no hand-wave for notifications lockscreen feature of the later 5.0+ versions; and there's no support for altpart Safestrap.

But that's where its downsides end and its upsides begin. With nearly any 3rd-party ROM it's a series of tradeoffs. What works and what doesn't, what do you need and what can you do without. Not so with SlimKat. Everything, and I mean everything, just... works. Flawlessly. Even HDMI. This ROM is feature-rich, yet still so lean you can run it with Slim's normal Gapps package on the

stock slot

. At 180MB, Slim's normal Gapps package is 15MB smaller than the OpenGapps nano package for 7.1.2. I've been running this as a daily driver for over a month and not a single thing has gone wrong with it. No force-closes. No hangs. No jitters. No crashes. No random reboots. This is as close to a stock ROM's stability and performance as anything I've ever used. It's fast and responsive and handles whatever you throw at it. All that and great battery life too - I typically get about 36-44 hours from a full charge.

Support for 4.4.4 is extensive throughout the app community and I have yet to find an app that doesn't work with it. Custom fonts are easily installed with iFont and there are extensive interface and navigation customizations available in the SlimCenter. Cyanogenmod/LineageOS 11 themes are available for it on the Play Store.

The stock SlimLauncher is extensively configurable, and supports gestures, desktop folders, grid size configuration, icon size configuration, hidden apps, hidden icon labels and much more. I prefer a horizontally paged interface for my app drawer, and this one works exactly as this should work, where you swipe left or right and each page of app icons disappears behind the next, rather than a continuous side-scroll. This is especially important on the Droid 4 because of its TFT screen's limitations that make things difficult to read when continuously scrolling against a dark background.

While most ROMs will let you disable some system apps, SlimKat has a SlimSizer app in the SlimCenter settings that lets you save or fully remove any included system app from a simple checklist. SU is integrated and the ROM is rooted out-of-the-box. Google Voice works seamlessly with it. Voice Search starts up quickly and doesn't hang or crash, and interactions with it are predictable. The built-in WiFi hotspot works flawlessly. It natively supports Face Unlock.

Its sole quirks are that the keyboard doesn't illuminate when you slide it open until you press a key, and direct reboot to recovery doesn't work (just do a standard reboot and activate SafeStrap recovery at startup).

Verdict: Hands down, the overall best 3rd party ROM I've tested for the Droid 4. Rock-solid, OEM-level reliability and performance in a compact yet feature-rich package with outstanding battery life. If you don't require a newer version of Android (5+) for app compatibility or features, and don't want the code-bloat of the later versions, you simply can't do better than SlimKat on the Droid 4.