Rooting\Custom ROM\Something

[Spirrwell]

I know there's plenty of topics on this already. I apologize for the redundancy, but before yesterday I've never had an Android, nor have I ever had any smartphone before and I'm a bit unknowing of everything. Oh and caution, a bit of story time ahead. (I'll mark the end of it to the point where I start asking stuff)

[StoryTime]

I had decided that I would get this unbranded phone. (and yeah, I read the sticky about those, heh)

So I'm having trouble with this stupid "insufficient storage space" when downloading apps from Google Play. When I had bought it, I knew it had 512 MB of ROM leaving a small portion of it to just phone storage and I thought that was perfectly okay because I could use a microSD. While downloaded\installed apps go to my SD, it appears to read the storage left on my phone. Say I have 20 MB left on my phone, I download a 30 MB app, it cuts out at 20 MB, even though I know it would go to my SD.

So, I thought I had found a potential solution by rooting the phone, and using this program Kingo Root I did just that! Or attempted anyway. When I was done the phone complained about it being modified to contact the system manufacturer and I thought "Oh great, bricked." But no, luckily I was able to still get into settings, then go back to my home screen, then go to SuperSU and disable it, which was bit more convoluted than need be.

However I did try some "fixes" that didn't seem to work before that such as this app MarketFix and other things.

Also it seems that certain apps will crash or be slow, so then I thought there was one solution... Custom ROM!! Then maybe I could even turn my Android into an Ubuntu Phone or something!

Ahaha... So I found that by pressing the volume up, volume down, and power button down it's supposed to go into some Android bootloader menu thing I dunno. I wanted to test it before connecting to the computer and attempting anything. But I got something completely unexpected that I probably should've expected. Some Chinese text mixed with little English! I guess I accidentally performed a factory reset by going through some menu through here. I still have no idea if the whole connecting to a computer, using a terminal and some stuff would still work, very well could, it seemed like it would. I just can't read what's going on with the phone.

[/StoryTime]

However it seems like ROMs are phone specific. Luckily, the unbranded phone came decently documented with what's inside of it. Though a bit of it I don't understand what it means.

Operating System: Android 4.2.2
Network: GSM unlocked
Hardware Platform: MTK6572
CPU: Dual-Core 1.2GHz
GPU Renderer: Mali-400 MP
GPU Version : OpenGL ES 2.0
RAM: 256MB (about 82MB avaliable)
ROM: 512MB (Internal storage :120MB + Phone storage:11 MB)

Some stuff from the "About phone" section in settings:

Model number: mini S5
Kernel version: 3.4.5
Build number: ALPS.JB3.MP.V1.6
Custom build version: YK818_S317_AOYI_CN_BT_FM_GS_WIFI_ALSPSN_6572AX_GSM_NAND_V002_140521_1250

I'm sorry for the long drawn out post, but I want to be as clear and concise as possible. Basically I want to install a custom ROM. But I'm unsure about it. As in I don't know about ROMs being phone specific or whatever. Any information is much appreciated, admittedly it would be much easier if I had a specific branded phone to find what I need, but meh, too late now. Thank you!

 

[Hadron]

Welcome to the forum

The problem is that custom ROMs really are phone specific. So it's not just a matter of finding a ROM for a phone with the same chipset as that one: you'd need to find one built for that specific model . Then you need a way of installing it - normally this is done by replacing the android recovery program with a "custom" version which can load unsigned software, but the catch is that the custom recovery also has to be built for the specific phone.

So to be honest I can't really offer much help with this. You might find someone in the "Other Androids" section here who can help, but my guess is that you'll be very lucky if you can find a custom ROM that will work with this hardware.

 

[kate]

Some stuff from the "About phone" section in settings:
Model number: mini S5

Just wanted to note that your phone is definitely not the S5 Mini, whoever made it is probably claiming to sell Galaxy S5 Mini phones. Don't use a S5 Mini ROM.

 

[Spirrwell]

Oh I'm aware that it's not an S5 mini. The person who sold it wasn't claiming it was, it was labeled as an unbranded unlocked phone. When I used Kingo Root however, it did read it as an HTC device.

But how does the custom ROM process work? I assume that it starts in someway with extracting the current ROM and modifying it.

 

[Hadron]

Well it depends how custom you want. At one end there are those which are just the stock ROM with a few system parameters tweaked, a couple of apps added/removed, a couple of binaries added or replaced. At the other end there are those which are built from scratch from AOSP (Android Open Source Project) sources.

 

[jhawkkw]

The main issue is that apps do not install to sd card, they install to the phone itself. Ever since Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), moving installed apps to the SD card has been removed. All the SD card can be used for is storing media like music, or videos. Rooting can possibly bring you the functionality back through a root enabled app, though I'm pretty sure it's device specific in which devices it can help.

Off branded devices rarely get custom roms due their popularity and lack of available binaries. You could build one yourself using the AOSP code from Google's developer SDK, but core functions will not likely work without reverse engineering the binaries, or it might not even boot up depending on which ones you're missing.