4.3 General questions

[calenatar]

So, before today my s3 had 4.1 on it, now VM pushed 4.3 on me. non rooted phone btw. I've got just a few simple gripe's that I'm hoping you all can help me remedy. first off, on the lock screen when I get a text message it used to show an icon that i'd swipe over and it would go straight to the new message. the new version of this is clunky and seems to not work half the time. any way I can change it back to the simple working version I used to have? also on the notification tray I used to have a mobile data button, now I do not. I keep my data off unless I want to use it to save battery during the day. when I go to the tray settings there's no option for adding mobile data even. there are 15 buttons that I can choose from

wifi
gps
sound
screen rotation
bluetooth
blocking mode
power saving
multi window
screen mirroring
sbeam
nfc
hands free
smart stay
sync
airplane mode

there used to be mobile data amongst those options and it made turning my data usage on and off quick and simple, now i have to click through a bunch of settings to turn it off and on.

Sorry if this seems newbish, I've just not got alot of experience with this phone to start with, and then they changed a bunch of stuff around on me and I could use a little help lol. Thanks

 

[Fazermint]

there used to be mobile data amongst those options and it made turning my data usage on and off quick and simple, now i have to click through a bunch of settings to turn it off and on.

Yeah they took it away, which is very annoying. I went to Play Store and got a simple data widget. Works great.

 

[struckn]

One of the developers on XDA has a flashable .zip file to restore the toggles that were available on 4.1.2 but are now missing on 4.3, including Mobile Data. Not sure if you have to be rooted or running custom recovery to use this, since I am both rooted and running custom recovery I have no way of knowing if this works for stock recovery, rooted or otherwise.

[STOCK ROM] Stock 4.3 MK3 ROM [ROOTED/UNROOTED] - Page 67 - xda-developers

Originally designed for MK3 Sprint version but confirmed working on MK5 VM stock rooted Knox-free version posted by jdsingle76.

 

[heat57]

To flash any .zip you have to have a custom recovery installed. YOu can't use the stock recovery for that purpose and you don't have to be rooted to flash a custom recovery, but if you're not rooted and don't have a custom ROM then your custom recovery will be overwritten during the next boot cycle and you're back to stock.

So to flash a .zip you need to put it on your SD card in your device, put into download mode and flash a custom recovery via Odin. Then before it reboots put it into recovery mode, flash the .zip (always clear cache and dalvik beforehand) and reboot.

Overall, it is simpler to root and never have to go through this, imho.

 

[struckn]

To flash any .zip you have to have a custom recovery installed. YOu can't use the stock recovery for that purpose and you don't have to be rooted to flash a custom recovery, but if you're not rooted and don't have a custom ROM then your custom recovery will be overwritten during the next boot cycle and you're back to stock.

So to flash a .zip you need to put it on your SD card in your device, put into download mode and flash a custom recovery via Odin. Then before it reboots put it into recovery mode, flash the .zip (always clear cache and dalvik beforehand) and reboot.

Overall, it is simpler to root and never have to go through this, imho.

True that on the rooting advice, and thanks for the clarification. Rooting is the first thing I do with any new device, opens up what Android is truly meant to be.