what rom do you use on your droid 4

[___]

Maybe I should have written a pm. bu then again, other people might be interested in this as well.

What rom do you use on your droid 4? I have had two of them, the first one has a broken micro usb port though, for about 3 years now and I think I tried just about every custom rom there is. Still, I haven't found one that performs stable and without seriously obnoxious lagg.

So I am really interested in what other people use on their imported droid 4 in Europe.

I used to run "liquid smooth" in different iterations. That was one the most comfortable to use, but it always turned crap at some point. Either the system got too slow in critical situations, like when having to answer a call and the screen just won't react quickly enough. Or it would have other horribly annoying side effects, like crashing apps and sudden reboots.

Now I am running CM13 with minimal gapps. It mostly works but is pretty slow. Some apps will hang while loading and I'll have to force close them and on the next load they will come up fine.

All I want is a stable system that lets me answer and make calls easily without some weird hiccup. I don't play any games on my phone, browse the internet a lot and sometimes do shell work and do some email stuff.

If it weren't for signal and some other apps I got accustomed to, I would downgrade and get my N900 up and running, that's how fed up I am with android.

 

[EvilDragon]

Latest CM (nightly) with minimal gapps as well. Together with Advanced Task killer it seems usable for me

 

[ingoreis]

Here are many Tips for speed up your Android in German:
http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17912&p=208556&hilit=sahin+android#p208539

 

[rygD]

Thanks for this thread. I guessed part of the answer, but it is still interesting to know what everyone uses.

 

[Shlee]

New Latest CM (nightly) with minimal gapps as well. Together with Advanced Task killer it seems usable for me

Wait what? As somebody who understands the Android subsystems.. killing old programs doesn't save power or improve performance. 100% placebo

plus you lose state.. which requires additional battery to bootstrap in some cases

that said... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yirgalab.dzzz&hl=en
this is the closest to a real battery saving app. if uses a fake VPN to block all network traffic when the phone is locked.. so your GSM/LTE hardware isn't sending/recieving junk when it's locked and saving power

 

[EvilDragon]

Wait what? As somebody who understands the Android subsystems.. killing old programs doesn't save power or improve performance. 100% placebo

It does, believe me, I tried.
It seems quite a few apps I use do something in the background. Without automatically killing the apps, the phone regularly is so slow I cannot even answer calls as waking up takes more than 30 seconds!
That never happened when killing apps regularly.
And no, not being able to answer phone calls is no placebo

I know everyone says Android does that itself properly, but certainly doesn't work properly on my phone.

Also, I'm using Opera Mini as browser. Waking up the phone while Opera is in the foreground takes ages. So the automatic kill fixes this for me as well.

 

[___]

Here are many Tips for speed up your Android in German:
http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17912&p=208556&hilit=sahin+android#p208539

thanks Ingo, I know about all these hacks. as I said, I've tried for years to get android running stable, not accelerate it. the lagg problem is an additional annoyance and fixing it with hacks/apps/workarounds seems to make the system unstable. I've been a member of xda for several years and have had multiple android devices. so these tipps are no news to me.

@EvilDragon you might want to try the app amplify, I think you need to install the xposed framework for that though. it lets you block certain wakelocks that drain battery and has quite a useful analysis overview which tracks which wakelocks waste most battery. really useful and doesn't affect stability, if you do not block any essential wakelocks (it will warn you if that is the case).

I guess I will stick to cm13 then. I haven't found any rom that is likely to surpass it as of yet. while performance isn't great, it's at least stable and doesn't crash randomly.

 

[Shlee]

Also, I'm using Opera Mini as browser. Waking up the phone while Opera is in the foreground takes ages. So the automatic kill fixes this for me as well.

If your device is that slow.... please let me send you my Galaxy next time I upgrade

 

[rygD]

Also, I'm using Opera Mini as browser. Waking up the phone while Opera is in the foreground takes ages. So the automatic kill fixes this for me as well.

No kidding. The one I am using right now seems to throw fits if I try to wake it up from a nap with Opera running, even if the screen just went off while I was reading something. My other one (a Photon Q), which is my main one at present, also acts a little flakey at times, but nowhere near as bad. I don't usually keep anything up on it when it is not being actively used, and I never bothered investigating what could be going on (getting my super long password correct is a bigger problem for me).

 

[Shlee]

also. I hate to be one of those people.... but.. you're running the latest cyanogenmod nightlies on a device that might be underpowered.. the performance will be tripe

side note: there are builds of Android for phones which are modified for performance reasons. Maybe consider looking at one of those?

 

[___]

also. I hate to be one of those people.... but.. you're running the latest cyanogenmod nightlies on a device that might be underpowered.. the performance will be tripe

side note: there are builds of Android for phones which are modified for performance reasons. Maybe consider looking at one of those?

Yeah but those slimmed down roms are non existent for the droid 4 which is such a shame. There were some good attempts, like liquid smooth e.g., but noone cared enough to continue fixing and releasing stuff. so most rom have some parts that are just a buggy mess. cm is pretty much the only one with active development. And I am not sure if a Cortex-A9 Dual Core device is underpowered. It's running at 1.2 Ghz under load and has a gigabyte of RAM. Is marshmallow really that demanding? maybe I should downgrade to an earlier android branch then.

btw: I am using team win recovery to run custom roms with kexec. I am using a modded version that lets me install on the NAND directly to circumvent the safe slot problem, where normally a virtual filesystem would be mounted from external sdcard, which prevents decent trimming and filesystem checks.

 

[benoitb]

Latest official CM rom runs really well on my Moto G 2nd. It is a quad core cortex A7 @1.2GHz and 1GB Ram. Performance should not be too far from a dual core A9 (A9 is slightly better than A7 I think).

Could it be possible that there are optimizations for Qualcomm chips in particular ?

 

[SneHebNor]

I'm using CM12, no GApps, just F-Droid.
My plan is, however, getting rid of Android completely as soon as I have the Pyra.
The idea is to use a SIP application such as Ekiga on the Pyra as mobile phone.

 

[klapse]

Sailfish!

android ppsspp is running pretty nice on it!. retroarch and emumaster for sailfish are broken somehow


aaand soon, Maemo-leste!
https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-second-update-april-2018.html

 

[___]

anyone have a source for legitimate droid 4 batteries? Last two I bought were fakes and I only took those after sending back batteries to the same seller twice because they were dead on arrival and I was glad I received working ones at all after all that hassle.

 

[b_o_b]

https://www.ebay.nl/itm/Original-Mo...857138?hash=item2cd77d0a72:g:7HMAAOSwIetbQ4ZA

I bought one 6 months ago. Still in the original packaged though, so didn't check it yet. My method on ebay is usually check rating of the seller and see if a specific product has bad comments.
99,2% is positive and as far as I can tell no bad ratings caused by fake EB41's.

Might be able to check the battery the next few weeks if you are not in a rush.

 

[___]

@b_o_b dang I didn't see your reply at all so did you get a chance to check the battery you received? is it legit?

In other news: I have decided to follow @klapses example and installed sailfish on my droid 4. So far I am pretty convinced that it is superior to any android ROM I ever had on any device. finally something that actually makes my device feel like a pocketable computer and not like a retarded tablet in phoneshape.
Since sailfish is still highly experimental and unofficial on the xt894, I am running lineage OS 14.1 on a seperate slot (I use safe slot and stock slot to avoid corruption of the OS over time) and I am using microG instead of Google Play Services. I have the play store running and my contacts/calendar syncing. Getting rid of the Google Play Services gave my phone an enormous boost, it's super snappy now, even with a ROM that's not meant for the old hardware.

Has anyone else gotten rid of the google play service framework completely? Using F-Droid instead of play store? anything like that? I'd love to hear some experiences.

 

[klapse]

@b_o_b
In other news: I have decided to follow @klapses example and installed sailfish on my droid 4. So far I am pretty convinced that it is superior to any android ROM I ever had on any device. finally something that actually makes my device feel like a pocketable computer and not like a retarded tablet in phoneshape.
Since sailfish is still highly experimental and unofficial on the xt894, I am running lineage OS 14.1 on a seperate slot (I use safe slot and stock slot to avoid corruption of the OS over time) and I am using microG instead of Google Play Services. I have the play store running and my contacts/calendar syncing. Getting rid of the Google Play Services gave my phone an enormous boost, it's super snappy now, even with a ROM that's not meant for the old hardware.

Has anyone else gotten rid of the google play service framework completely? Using F-Droid instead of play store? anything like that? I'd love to hear some experiences.

Eeexcellent. Do you have the alien dalvik running? TheKits newer keyboard layout with Ctrl-key mapped? Does emumaster or retroarch work for you?

 

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@klapse I haven't gotten that far yet, work got in the way. I am planning to get alien dalvik runnin this weekend but I need more information. I have the patch file from the maemo forums but can't figure out which exact version to try installing and patching. you wouldn't happen to have a patched alien dalvik rpm I could use by any chance? retroarch and emumaster aren't really interesting for me on a phone with no gaming controls, so I wasn't keen on trying it out.

Have you seen that Maemo Leste has received an update recently? New builds for droid 4 and n900!!! I think I might try it finally and install it on my n900, I think the droid 4 version isn't quite there yet.

 

[klapse]

Gaming controls? Do you not have a phone with a hardware keyboard? It does suffice for rpgs. Cross-platform Emulators are a real nice way to get a feel for the performance of a device, which is why they are one of the first things I test with.

I'd like to play with leste if I could get a few more waking productive hours in the day. But that's not gonna happen. Sticking with sailfish for now.