[Galaxy S 4 General] spaced<->out:
Well... My S4 is dead, the internal memory is completely finished 😢

By the end of last week I was battling through more and more problems, apps and functions would suddenly crash and no longer run - ranging from my internet banking and messaging apps, to background services, or all of Settings. I found I could fix it by uninstalling and reinstalling the affected app (or reflashing all of LOS in the case of Settings), but more kept breaking.

We limped on like this til approximately 1pm on Saturday (right before I needed to leave the house), when LOS spontaneously crashed and bootlooped. Reflashing LOS didn't restore it, so I had to wipe data and do a clean install (and do it on the hop, skipping restoring accounts so that I could just have a working phone and camera while I was out). After returning home I flashed again and went through the process of restoring my accounts overnight.

The following Sunday was fairly trouble free right up until about 9pm, when it crashed and bootlooped again. I went through the motions again to wipe and clean install LOS, and just restored enough of my accounts to get working for the next day.

On Monday morning the phone was already feeling flaky, so I decided to try restarting LOS... Guess what happened? Yep, immediate bootloop 😞

At this point I had to give up on the S4. Rest in peace faithful friend. Still hadn't settled on a replacement purchase so I determined to pass the baton to my spare Sony Xperia Z5 Compact (Z5C).

The first thing I had to do was go out and get a new Nano SIM card activated for my mobile service - the card in my S4 was a Micro SIM without the breakout for Nano SIM size, that's how old it was - so I could put it in the Z5C.

Over in the Z5C forums, I found user @Berni-0815 has posted threads for unofficial builds of all versions of LOS for this device (and customised TWRP too), so I set out to upgrade the stock Android 7.1.1 with their LOS 19.1 ROM.

I fumbled my way through installing TWRP via the process of {install adb - try to use fastboot to connect and flash - troubleshoot fastboot error - find fastboot USB drivers - troubleshoot fastboot error - find instructions to unlock bootloader - finally flash TWRP image}. The documentation is all out there, but I didn't find any handy all-in-one guides so I had to interpret errors and search up solutions.

After that, installing LOS went without a hitch.

It seems to work pretty good! Berni's builds integrate microG so I had to mod it to replace with GApps, after which all my accounts restored just fine like so many times with the S4. The Z5C feels a little more performant with less lag than the S4, which would be the two years' better hardware. Screen feels a little cramped in comparison, and seems to have some weird ghosting issue (it's been previously replaced, so might be a "seconds" stock). But overall size in the hand is about the same and I've been having fun with the fingerprint reader, so pretty chuffed.

In theory now, this is a placeholder while I finalise what new(er) device I should get. In practice, I'm feeling very satisfied about resurrecting my Z5C, so I might be giving it some time to decide how much I like using this, quite likely procrastinating the purchase decision again...