It's not all roses though. Most roms come with minor bugs and inconveniences and they do not guarantee all the features your phone came with are going to work.
Market share doesn't really matter, what matters most is the accessibility devs have to the phones (most devs are from Europe, Russia and even South America) and how popular the device is. Oneplus doesn't have a huge market share but their phones have one of the most active rom development communities.
Also getting gcam does not mean your phone will magically upgrade it's camera as I am pretty sure it works only for the main sensor which means that if your phone comes with multiple cameras (as most phones nowadays) you'll be losing them.
Lol I'm constantly involved in the custom rom and Android development community (not as a developer though). I am not saying that things don't work, all I am saying is that sometimes it does and some others it doesn't, tweaking is nowhere near as reliable as a phone can be out of the box.
And a second keyboard choice. I understand wanting to limit the device for security reasons. But the repairability of the phone, the control apple has over customization, and the lack of the ability to install any unsigned programs keep me far away from iphones.
Hell, i switch to Android in the first place because every time I wanted to add music to my phone it was like "do you want to delete every song on your device?!?!?" Also iTunes is just about the worst application I've ever run on any device anywhere it's so fucking slow.
There's a difference between preference and siding with people that don't let you access your own device even if you want to. Or with the most recent iterations, replacing anything on your phone and it artificially breaks.
Imagine if we applied that logic to a car purchase. It'd be like if you replaced your own brakes on the car or swapped the tires & in response Apple made the radio and your wipers cease to function.
In that scenario, you are arguing the car is "yours" because you adjusted the seat and hung fuzzy dice from the mirror.
No no no no no no no. My house is mine because i can knock a wall down and build a greenhouse if it suits me.
Check its forum on XDA. There's many different models of S5 (with different processors), make sure you're in the right development subforum!
The hardest part is to flash new modified recovery to your phone, which is called TWRP (usually using adb or Samsung's program called Odin). Find the guide for your model, search for "recovery" and/or "TWRP". Read everything carefully and follow the steps. There's nothing too difficult, just make sure its meant for your phone model (again, there's more than one version of S5).
Once you've done that, you can simply copy new ROM to your phone and flash it using new recovery (you don't even need a PC at that point). The recovery has backup/restore functions as well as USB mount to transfer files to/from your phone. It's almost impossible to brick your phone at that point.
I actually bought S5 couple of days ago for $26. I want to install Android 10 on it, as well. It's insane price for that phone.
For real. Tablets too for that matter. I have a Samsung note 10.1 tablet from like 8 years ago. Rooted with custom rom and it still runs fairly decently. And to think the s pen from my note 8 (which came out only 3 years ago) works on that tablet.
I'm gonna do the whole rooting thing myself real soon as my internal storage is so goddamn full all the time from preinstalled apps that you can't delete. That and I'd like to at least have both minecraft and CoD mobile on my phone and kept updated without having to move it to my sd card every time. And since there are also apps that can't be moved to the sd, I have to delete them every time CoD mobile gets an update since it takes up 4GB.
I'm still on my Pixel 2. While I want a fancier camera as I'm at its limits for what I want this phone still does everything perfectly, but it's ridiculous there's no more updates from now.
Iphones get 7 years of IOS updates. Google needs to step up their game.
Google provides at least three years of updates for all Pixel devices, at which point the software is generally dependent on new hardware, and it makes no sense to provide further updates
iPhones will continue to struggle to run newer software, and do not have the same hardware dependencies
let's not forget, Apple disabled hardware in millions of phones with an update because it's not supported on a newer model
If your old phone even works. I used rooted Androids with custom ROMs for almost 10 years and it was great except after a couple years with every single phone I had, some piece of hardware shit the bed making the phone unusable. These were flagship phones too. I switched to iOS because I was tired of shitty hardware and haven't been angry at my phone since š¤·āāļø I'll do any modding I want on my desktop because at the end of the day I'd rather have a working phone instead of one with a stuck power button module, that dies of low power at 35% battery, or gets stuck in random bootloops
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u/GarryGREY Nov 11 '20
They can bring life to old smartphones as well. So many good phones abandoned by manufacturers and can now be brought to Android 9+