After lurking around some forums, I found that there was a custom ROM for my phone which surely would have better performance than the stock ROM? Well hopefully so. In any case, I didn’t want to upgrade my ROM prior to going on vacation in case it caused unexpected behaviour on my phone.

I didn’t really listen to my own advice, and went ahead and upgraded from my stock ROM yesterday; although I didn’t install a custom ROM, but just the updated version of the stock ROM. It was still a pain and took a long time because upgrading your ROM wipes out all your installed applications and settings. Here’s what I did to get around that:

1. Rooted my phone (using z4root)
2. Installed Titanium Backup and backed up all System apps, system data, user apps and user data using a batch operation
3. Flashed the new firmware
4. Re-rooted my phone
5. Add my Google account to get Android market access
6. Installed Titanium Backup again and used a batch operation to restore all my backups
7. Used ROM Manager to fix all my permissions (potentially unnecessary, but I thought I needed it to fix my widgets)
8. Re-added onto my home screen all my widgets since they would not load after restoring from backup

This still took a long time because when restoring from backups, Android would ask for permission to install every single app again. Plus, I’m not sure if I will gain the benefit of the new ROM as I overwrote all the system apps from backups (at least I stayed on the same version of the OS so this was possible).

Even with this shortcut, it took probably 2 hours to get it all done, with lots of manual input. Looks like there is a lot of work in this space to make things easy.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, cellphones, complaining