[Galaxy A3, A5, A7, A8, A9 General] Skulldron:
Hey Everyone! This is the ultimate guide to running the Galaxy A5 of 2014 or better known as the SM-A500F, as a daily driver and hopefully its noob friendly enough. All links included below.

Story Time:

I currently daily drive a Galaxy S10 and it has never really ever let me down, that was until I dropped it and the screen fractured. Due to backlog at the Samsung Service Center, they said that it would be approximately a month and a half before the phone would be fully repaired. As such, I was stuck with the Galaxy A5 that I had bought maybe 6-7 years ago at this point, which I hadn't touched in years, as my only phone, and with a large chunk of money going towards fixing the shattered display of the S10, it was apparent that I was going to be stuck with this old, Snapdragon 410, 64bit CPU but 32bit locked bootloader, phone. This lead to a huge dilemna. There was no way on earth that I was gonna use stock on this phone, because although the stock firmware ran alright, it left a lot to be desired. And hence, began the conquest to find the ultimate ROM for the A5, which involved diving through many many threads, even more ROMs. In the last month and a half, I have gone through approximately, 14-15 ROMs, from various developers such as Srkndennis, a couple of Soft-Bullet ROMS (The ones that were still up anyways), and some Samsung Expereince Ports by Corsicanu and some Deadsquirrel ROMs. With an average time of a day each, I have come to a conclusion, on what are the definitive daily driver ROMs for this aging device.

Disclaimer: This is my opinion. This entire threads description on what the two best ROMs for this device, are purely based on my use case scenarios, and how I utilized it. Your mileage can and will vary and your devices performance will also vary. I have just selected, which again in my opinion, is the best possible ROM for this device, and for my use case scenario.

Pre-requisites:

Latest Stock Firmware:

https://samfw.com/firmware/SM-A500F/XSG - You'll want to be on the latest possible firmware and bootloader to begin modifiying and flashing different ROMs.

Recovery:

Now this is a bit more complicated. There have been many recoveries released for the a500f over the years, with various improvements. The best one I've found however is ashyx's recovery, which is one of the few, if not the only recovery that supports MTP. The only other recovery that you would need is if you plan to use the a5 with f2fs ROMs.

Ashyx Recovery: https://xdaforums.com/t/recovery-root-twrp-3-0-2-1-samsung-galaxy-a5-2015-sm-a500f-fu-g-h-m.3360802/

Deadsquirrel's F2FS Recovery: https://androidfilehost.com/?fid=817550096634793304 (Note: Not all ROMs support F2FS, and on the ROMs that did, I had to modify the installer script).

Odin 10.6:

Well, you need this to flash recoveries in the first place, so its essential.

Link: https://odindownload.com/download/Odin3_v3.10.6.zip

Magisk:

This is needed for root access as well as to pass safetynet. I used primarily the canary builds, as they have the highest pass rate, but this is preference.

Link: https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk - Just scroll down and you'll see various versions that say "Magisk", "Magisk Beta" and "Magisk Canary". Select whichever you prefer.

Samsung USB Drivers:

Samsung Android USB Driver | Samsung Developers

You need the driver only if you are developing on Windows and want to connect a Samsung Android device to your development environment over USB.

developer.samsung.com

Key Note: Remember that downloading will give you an apk. To get the installer, just rename "Magisk.apk" to "Magisk.zip".

Gapps:

This is essentially for Google Apps. This should never be flashed on ROMs that already have GAPPS such as Samsung Experience ROMs and Pixel Experience ROMs. Honestly, I would refer to the Lineage OS Gapps Guide. They tell you which Gapps work best with stock android ROMs. Just remember, to choose the lightest package always, unless you absolutely need something else from the other packages, since this little a5 only has 2 GB of available RAM, and Google Apps can very easily eat through that. In the case of Open Gapps for example, pick pico.

Link: https://wiki.lineageos.org/gapps

Thats about it for the pre-requisites. Its now time to get to the actual problem.

The problem with a device this old, and this underpowered:

The hardware of this device does leave a lot to be desired, in basically all areas, except build quality. It is a strange feeling to hold a phone with a metal unibody, but thats where the plus sides end. This phone is quite severally underpowered. The Snapdragon 410 in this device was weak when it launched, and is still very weak by today's standards. It scores 85 on the single core of Geekbench, and 305 on its multicore, which is quite staggeringly low. On top of this, Samsung have done something quite silly with this phone's bootloader and locked it to 32bit, for a 64bit processor. While this means that apps can never run on 64bit mode, it does mean we achieve slight memory savings at the very least. On the topic of memory, this phone has 2GB, which wouldn't be so bad, if it just wasn't really slow, as well as really old. Its storage isn't much to write home about, being quite slow as well. All in all this means that the ultimate ROM for the A500F, would have to be light on memory, be quite optimized in terms of applications installed, and have a good kernel/drivers. Heavy ROMs can run on this device, but it is upto you whether or not, you want to deal with the repercussions of being constantly low on memory, and the additional CPU cycles needed to run the additional bloat.

The Trifecta:

Well, at the very least, there is some good news. We have 3 potential daily driver ROMs, after extensively testing every ROM, XDA has to offer. These ROMs in my opinion, perform the best in terms of sheer performance, battery life and just overall usability.

1. A8 2018 Port by Prototype74:

This may come as a surprise to most of you, but yes, if Samsung Experience is something that cannot be lived without, then this ROM does it all. Not only does it offer all the glorious features that Samsung ROMs offer, it still offers quite decent performance with great camera performance to go with it. The built in Samsung Theme engine works, so this means it is possible to theme the device to give it, its own dark mode, after selecting an amoled theme, which is great for a daily driver. There are a couple of downsides which I will list down below, but this ROM by far, is the best performing Samsung Experience ROM out of all of them. However, do remember I did this testing, by selecting the lightest possible bloatware selection, but still keeping the theme engine alive.

+ Positives:

- All the Samsung Features you'll ever need

- Debloatable Installer

- The best functioning camera out of all three ROMs

-Great Idle and Standby time and overall decent battery life

/ Negatives:

- RAM Management - Obviously with the amount of features of a Samsung Experience ROM, RAM suffers. This ROM manages it well, but it is still noticeable, with apps left in memory too long closing, and overall sluggish performance the more apps that are opened.

- Performance - Now I did state that performance is great for a Samsung Experience ROM, but this is excluding the next two options. In comparison, this ROM can suffer at times from stutters, app load times, scroll jitter and overall lag sometimes. The reason I've recommended this ROM is because it is genuinely few and far between, and performs the same, if not better stock most of the time.

Link: https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-a300xx-a500xx-tw-7-1-1-v6-0-seperience-rom-a8-2018-port.3754851/

- Side Note: To keep the theme engine alive, you will need to keep installed, Samsung Account and Samsung Themes itself. It also important that "Gameoptimizer" service is deselected as it has been proven to ruin performance than actually improve it, and I'm not just referring to games.

2. Srkndennis's SlimROM Android 7.1.2:

Well, its in the name. SlimROM is famed for being light, incredibly light, and this takes the equation of speed to a whole new tier. The ROM in itself is from the ground up, built to meet one goal, light. It is incredibly fast, incredibly memory efficient, and almost everything benefits from it. Now this being stock android, there are a lot of "Samsung" comfort features that just won't be there, but honestly, the pefromance and battery gained from just running something light, is immeasurable.

+ Positives:

- Stellar Performance, best out of all three

- Stellar Battery and Standby, again the best out of all three

- Lightest of the bunch, and holds the most amount of apps in memory

/ Negatives:

- Lacks some features and customization found in other ROMs such as Lineage OS and Resurrection Remix:

Link: https://mega.nz/folder/7s0CnQpL#OpPDOEsGA5APizajXRZ32A/folder/v4Ug3YLD

Other ROMs, especially those on higher android versions:

After heavy experimenting on ROMs of newer android versions, it is apparent that the A5 peaks, at Android 7.1.2. Any android version after this, while not having any hardware issues necessarily, will just not function anywhere near as quick, nor as responsive. The only firmware that even gets remotely close to being partially usable is srkndennis's Android 10. When I state usable, I mean in term's of UI switching, application performance and overall speed with battery efficiency. This is NOT

because the ROMs aren't made well, this is genuinely just the limitation of the hardware on the A5. Remember that this device can barely run most basic apps, due to the bare minimum requirements of these apps slowly increasing due to the addition of more modern features.

That being said, this little device can still function, and quite well at that too. You just need to select the right firmware for it. It's Magnus Opus.

Installation guide for any of the ROM's listed here today:

1. If stock start from the top, if not go from step f.

a. Power down the A5, and once it has shut down, hold the volume down, power button and home button simultaneously.

b. Once the warning show up, press volume up, and enter download mode. Once this is done, plug your phone into your laptop.

c. Open the Odin zip, and extract it into a new folder. Once this is done, run the setup for Samsung USB Drivers and let it install.

d. Once that is done, open Odin, and in AP select the needed recovery. Ensure that the recovery image you downloaded is in a .tar zip file and the recovery image inside that .tar file is renamed recovery.img

e. Once it is selected, start the flash, and wait till the program finishes. Right when the screen goes blank on the phone, quickly hold the volume up, home and power button simultaneously till recovery boots.

f. Now that twrp is booted, click on wipe, and select, system, data, dalvik cache and cache.

g. Once the wipe is complete, copy over Magisk, the ROM you require and the GAPPs (if needed).

h. First select the ROM and install it. Then Gapps (if required. it is not recommended on Samsung Touchwiz ROMs). Then finally, install Magisk.

i. Click on reboot system, and that's it, you've installed your ROM. Just wait for the device to boot now.

Thanks for reading, hope ya'll have a good day!