Android Galaxy S3 rooting recommandation?

[Arizato]

So I just went from an iPhone 4 to a Galaxy S3 and I currently reading up on some rooting options for my phone. However with all the different kernels, rooting options and apps I am pretty confused since I am new to this whole Android thing!

Is rooting worth it? What custom kernel should I use? Will it improve my battery-life? Will my phone become faster?

Basically it all comes down to me wanting a faster phone with longer battery life. What are your recommendations?

 

[yusuo]

When I had a galaxy s3 I used wanam with boffela, if you wanna go for pure android though you could try aosp like cyanogen or slimbean

 

[cracker]

Some things don't work right on AOSP based ROMs with Galaxy devices (the camera being one). I have a Verizon S3 and use CleanROM 8.1. If you have another carrier then search for it along with debloated and deodexed. Both of those can significantly increase speed, available RAM, and battery life. You could alternatively debloat the official firmware manually with one of many apps that can freeze and/or delete system apps but you have to make sure not to remove anything vital and searching for a list of safe to remove apps.

 

[Joe88]

It depends what version is installed, cf-auto root should do it but if it has knox installed its going to make things more problematic

 

[fenor]

So I just went from an iPhone 4 to a Galaxy S3 and I currently reading up on some rooting options for my phone. However with all the different kernels, rooting options and apps I am pretty confused since I am new to this whole Android thing!

Is rooting worth it? What custom kernel should I use? Will it improve my battery-life? Will my phone become faster?

Basically it all comes down to me wanting a faster phone with longer battery life. What are your recommendations?

you sound like a user without experience so don't root it. the battery will be drained the same with or without rooting, it's how you use it that determinate how long it will last. remove wifi when not using them, same with 3g/4g, gps and so on. on the same page the phone will not become faster it's what you install. rooting is made so that you have access to root options, this will come with his own risk

 

[TyBlood13]

I use Cyanogenmod on my S3, it was worth since it got rid of the horrible TouchWiz ROM

 

[cracker]

But what is broken still with CM on the S3? When I last tried all of the custom ROMs (less than a year ago) there was the camera problem and random video problems that weren't worth it to me to go TW-free. I really don't see why there is such a hate about it anyway.

 

[Joe88]

You either love it or you hate it for many people
But alot of people just hate for the reason thats its not stock therfore it sucks

Many of the built in apps are far better then googles though, multiwindow, when you get to the last page the app selection it loops back to the first page, background on app drawer pages

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

But what is broken still with CM on the S3? When I last tried all of the custom ROMs (less than a year ago) there was the camera problem and random video problems that weren't worth it to me to go TW-free. I really don't see why there is such a hate about it anyway.

On the S3? Are you sure? (regarding CM)

When I had my own S3 a little over a year ago, CM10.1 had no problems with video or camera And I know on CM11 the camera works fine, since I installed CM11 on my brothers S3 about a month ago, and there were no issues with it when I tested camera and stuff.

 

[yusuo]

Definetly root, I've never had a phone that I don't immediately wipe, flash a custom ROM and root straight away, like literally even before I first turn it on (no point in setting up all Google info twice)

Here's my experience with aosp and tw based roms on the galaxy s3 (had the phone for 2 years)

Camera has occasional problems on cm11 (basically the rom refusing to actually connect to the camera hardware, something along the lines of failed to initialise) but I think they figured out a work around that let you manually reset the camera firmware (never a problem on cm 10.2 or below). My one and only problem with aosp aka cyanogen and others is that the battery tends to be a lot worse, this is due to lack of official documentation released by let's say Samsung, which in turn forces 3rd party Devs to write something that is for lack of a better term, a botch job driver that doesn't fully understand the hardware it's supposed to be running. this doesn't stop me using it mind as I gain alot more storage space as well as a more streamlined ROM, lacking any bloat or ram hogs that I didn't specifically choose myself.
I would say go with slimkat or slimbean, both are basically cyanogenmod but with a few extras and tweaks under the hood.

If you want to go with a Samsung firmware use wanamlite. It adds alot of features and also allows hardware call recording, on top of this the quality you get from a Samsung based roms camera will always beat what you'll get on a aosp based ROM camera, just choose what is more important to you

 

[cracker]

You either love it or you hate it for many people
But alot of people just hate for the reason thats its not stock therfore it sucks

Many of the built in apps are far better then googles though, multiwindow, when you get to the last page the app selection it loops back to the first page, background on app drawer pages

Yeah I can understand the want to have more control over customizing things -- it is, afterall, Android. I just use Apex (before that Go Launcher -- until it got too bloated and caused problems). I think the main reason I like it better is the expanded menu when tap-holding on app icons on the homescreen since I often go through newly-downloaded apps and many times uninstall them shortly after or need to clear the cache, etc. in app info.

On the S3? Are you sure? (regarding CM)

When I had my own S3 a little over a year ago, CM10.1 had no problems with video or camera And I know on CM11 the camera works fine, since I installed CM11 on my brothers S3 about a month ago, and there were no issues with it when I tested camera and stuff.

That is interesting. It was CM10.1 that I last tried and it definitely did give me the same camera problems that plagued all the other non-TW firmwares at the time. Maybe I nearly missed the fix by it being in a nightly (only went stable because it is a pain in the ass to keep reinstalling on your only phone). I would try again but I don't want to lose progress in my games! I've never been able to change my Android ID back after installing new FW.

 

[Duo8]

Any hints for a Korean S3? It's SHV-E210S.

 

[yusuo]

Titanium backup will bring all of you app settings and game saves over to whatever ROM you want to try, the only app I've ever had trouble restoring is waze, dunno why but always gives me trouble restoring

 

[cracker]

I know it can but some apps will save/sync a unique ID based on the Android ID which makes this useless unless you go hacking through the app storage -- if you can.

 

[Duo8]

I know it can but some apps will save/sync a unique ID based on the Android ID which makes this useless unless you go hacking through the app storage -- if you can.

Ti can backup/restore the ID too.

 

[cracker]

I tried that but it actually wasn't able to. Nothing I tried has been able to, unfortunately. It would act as if it was successful but upon rebooting it was still the same.

 

[Minox]

I tried that but it actually wasn't able to. Nothing I tried has been able to, unfortunately. It would act as if it was successful but upon rebooting it was still the same.

Some apps depends upon both Android ID and certain files on the internal user storage. Personally the only application I've encountered that does this is Line, but so long as I restore the ID, application data and the extra data on the internal storage I've had no problems restoring it. There might be something similar going on with the application you tried with.

 

[Arizato]

I ended up rooting the phone, backing up the data and flash and then later reflashed the phone with Cyanogenmod 11, it's been great so far. Phone runs so much faster for one, but also better performance in apps and stuff like that. Are there any more measures I can take to give my phone even better performance?

 

[tHciNc]

CF-Auto Root is best for rooting most phones, For newer phones easiest way to root at present with phones pre kernel 3rd June is using geohots towelroot, used it to root my S5 without it triggering knox, However newest Moto and HTC don't currently work because /system is write protected
http://towelroot.com
Performance wise there are alot of custom roms to choose from, depending on what type of performance you want
Check out http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3