[Galaxy S 4 Mini Android Development] elfulus:
Thx again - Could be great - But too buggy/laggy on the long run

I really liked the idea of having a fresh Android on my beloved aged but relatively powerful S4 Mini VE. But unfortunately, after using this Pixel Experience ROM for a couple of weeks, I am close to reverting to the previous state (if recovery works out well).

Perhaps others have more luck with it. But I cannot see what I should have done wrong in using TWRP 3.4 customized for this phone with complete wipe/format, etc. as per the usual guidelines. Only thing worth mentioning during install is that after ROM flash the first reboot into the new OS went relatively fast (almost like a normal reboot), whereas many guides say this first time should take 10-15minutes. Not sure if this alleged rooting is real. Others also say you might update modem driver before ROM upgrade, but only if old.

As posted previously a number of issues have made me crying more and more and ever new things seem to come up:

* System behaviour:

- very erratic for system lag or hang: It may work fine for sometime, but whenever you have at least 3-4 apps open, especially opening apps that use web libraries (every browser, sometimes news reader/Wiki, etc.) it may get stuck to a point where almost nothing works (screen black, keyboard not popping up, app launcher hangs, pixel or system UI might hang as well). I can then either wait-wait-wait until I can close some hung apps or remove battery. This happens frequently (2-6 times a day) and is the main source of my pain. Since Android does not allow for CPU% scanning since 8.0 you will never find out what is causing it. But something is defintely behaving wrong because when this starts to happen the phone is also getting quite warm, apparantly for max CPU% times. My guess would be: Faulty web libraries, some faulty drivers (especially modem drivers), buggy System/Pixel UI or even a security concern.

- sometimes (2-3 times in 2 weeks) enters strange flashing Google splash start screen loops (with the rainbow G in a white screen popping up like in stroboskope mode until you either press power button or take off battery). This can occur after a reboot or even whitout me doing anything (phone just in standby).

- Keyboard comes up very slowly in text boxes (sometimes 3-6 seconds)

- Restarting the phone sometimes starts the phone, sometimes switches it off.

*SD Card/storage framework:

-accessing SD card storage from apps via "new" storage framework method" can take very long: e.g. Camera apps (Open camera and Snap Camera) as well as Gallery apps (Piktures as well as Snap Gallery) take ages (4-8s) to put new pic into the correct SD card camera folder or show them immediately whereas it works flawlessly using internal memory (purchased a very new 64GB SD card, formated it with this phone, but anyway also happened with the previous SD card).

* Wifi:

-Wifi2.4Ghz + Bluetooth at the same time do not work well together (Wifi throughput drops to 1-10%)

-takes ages to connect to a known hidden 5G network or does not connect at all. But no problem, when connecting it manually.

* Camera:

-none of the various G or S camera ports out there (neither older nor newer versions neither Snapdragon nor Exynos) can be installed on this image (and I tested a few).

-Pre-installed open camera is good but lacks HDR/Panorama (save pictures crashes the app, perhaps due to the storage framework issue mentioned above). Found Snap Camera HDR to be a good pay app alternative but no longer maintained and not as good as G/S stock cams apps

* Security:

- multi factor authentication app for banking (pushtan) did work for a day (tested it). Some time later it refused to even start, instead opening web page with a security warning claiming this system was not secure for either being installed from scratch with reduced security or even being rooted. To my knowledge that should not be the case. However, app "Phone Info Samsung" says under Android=>Root-Existenz=

Yes

. Clicking on this field it comes up with ro.build.tags=test-keys. It might be related to the Custom ROM or the Samsung Knox counter (Phone Info app just says for Knox Warranty Status: "warranty bit not found" and after ROM flash phone started coming up with yellow line "set warranty bit=kernel"). But why would it then have worked once?

- Obviously, with the strange system lagging, the slow Keyboard app and these warnings one can get some doubts about security and trust might go down using this environment. Anyway, I can definitely no longer use this phone for multifactor authentication for banking.

* Appearance: Pixel experience being a "reduced to the max" Google design could be nice but does not suit well on a small screen. Huge unused display edge areas on screen but small icons (can be enlarged) and small widgets. But also icon titles are cut with ". . ." if they exceed 8 characters/1 line which renders most of the titles unreadable. Other text in apps might sometimes also be extremely tiny.

* Battery

-Drains more of the aged battery (this was expected but even using energy saver incl. dark theme all the time does not help substantially).

- runs down battery to almost 0% before switching off without any prior warning (like 10%=>5% warning or so). This is not because of faulty battery with an odd drain graph that jumps to 0 suddenly. It just slowly drains battery over the day until 0%. Not so good for any battery but especially not for old batteries.

Summarizing my experience: I truly appreciate your effort behind pulling all the sources together and assembling something for a device that is no longer officially supported on LOS or anywhere. Installing it might be good if you just want to recycle an old otherwised unused S4 mini VE from the drawer to enjoy Android10 working on an old phone and perhaps do some nice things with it.

However, it is not so good if you just want to carry on using the same phone as you did before in an everyday scenario just with a new OS. For that purpose backing everything up, formating, wiping, moving all existing data over to the new OS in a safe way (not using any clouds) and customizing new OS once more is just to much of an effort if the result is a system with above everyday issues & glitches that you might not even trust. When your new builts with latest security patches and possible bug fixes arrive it remains unclear if is safe to just install them without full wipe keeping all existing data. At least so far nobody confirmed that to me to be a good option. Hence, you would have to go through all of that again and again.

Sunny regards and all the best for future development, elfulus