Using CyanogenMod on Android Phones

Messing about with the Samsung Galaxy S3

It can be quite difficult to get hold of the latest operating system for Android and I have found this to be the case with my Samsung Galaxy S3. There has been no sign from the mobile operator of any updates from the operating system that first came when I got the phone over seven months ago. So I have been loading other ROMs onto the phone and one I am using at the moment is from CyanogenMod and it is version 11.2. I went with this version because I had reports that it was a stable version of the Android operating system. I had to go to the CyanogenMod.org website to find a download. I did find an install application that works on the Mac, but it didn’t seem to work. For some reason it very kept saying that there was an update to the installer, but never let me go to where I could get the update.

Trying to update this way and that

In the end after trying various possibilities to update the phone from a downloaded version of it from the website in conjunction with the ROM Manager application I eventually got an indication that showed it was downloading. I left it overnight because there was no change to it after a number of hours and in the morning it still said it was downloading. I was sure that it must have finished by that time, my Internet is not that slow, and I disconnected it anyway and rebooted. It rebooted into the new version of CyanogenMod, but then I found that I had no applications that had come from Google Play Store.

A whole morning of research and updating

I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to get the CyanogenMod operating system to see the Google play school store to recognise the applications which I suspected were still actually on the phone, but hidden. I should really make notes about the various things that I try as I do them because I’m not quite sure how I managed to get ROM Manager back onto the phone so that I could do a reinstall of the gapps ROM. In any case once I had got the Google play store back in action I was able to re-download all of my applications that I had purchased previously.

Of course I also had to reset up all of the identities that are connected to various services and applications, such as with Google, CyanogenMod, Facebook and Twitter etc. After spending so much time to actually get these things to run again I was just delighted that my phone was back in operation once again. With all of the problems that I created for myself by updating to a later version of CyanogenMod, you would have to wonder why on earth I did it. I had been having the occasional crash of my phone when using the 10.2 version of the operating system and so it was because of that I decided to do the upgrade.

My first attempt at the upgrade kind of worked, inasmuch as the phone got upgraded, but I found I was having even more system reboots that than before. It was this that prompted me to to a new and more thorough operating system upgrade and it was this one that created such a lot of work and the loss of a morning. It seems to me that it is because there are so many different Android phones and even more various ways of doing things like rooting and applying weird and wonderful ROMs that it is all seems very confusing. Aside from having to learn the different terminologies that are used within the Android world, when you get started with whatever process you can’t help but wonder if it is going to work with the specific changes that you want to make.

Android versus iOS

I saw on the Internet today that there are a number of people complaining about random crashes of their iOS devices due to the latest version of IOS 7. So despite the difficulties that I have had today with my Android phone, I can’t see any compelling reasons to change back to the Apple mobile computer ecosphere. I still much prefer having the larger screen to work with and generally everything is working well for me with the Samsung Galaxy S3. The one big thing with the difference between the two that is most likely to keep me with Android is that I can change to use a better keyboard than the standard Android keyboard. Swiftkey has been my favourite and I still like it because it allows me to have arrow keys on the keyboard which help me move around in the text. Just lately though I have been using the application called Swype which is from the company called Nuance because I like the way that I can easily slide the finger around on the keyboard to write the words. I can also do that with SwiftKey, but with Swype I also get a better voice input that takes into account of my UK based language input.