Thank you very, very much for your impressing work product!!
Since my 12y old daughter ran out of internal memory on her SM-J530F, and yelling at me to buy her the new Samsung A53 whatever, I rather invested some time figuring out how to flash /e/ on her phone.
I was a little skeptical in the beginning as this is about an unofficial build, but well - I have nothing to lose, if I brick it, I’d have to buy a new one anyway.
Actually, it was not my first time flashing /e/ as I’m proudly using it for several months now on my SM-A520F.
To flash my daughters SM-J530F I looked up to these instructions here → Install e OS on Samsung Galaxy J5 Pro SM-J530F - Custom Rom Android 10 - TechNO .
It worked basically fine downloading TWRP, installing /e/, but for some memory reason it failed to install OpenGApps - however, to my surprise the latter is not a decisive precondition because the smartphone boots /e/ and everything works smooth and great!
After having installed all needed apps, there is still 7GB out of 16GB available - Amazing!!!
Everything great? Almost, the cam stretches the pictures, and I hope to find a solution to this somehow. I wouldn’t even care about this little flaw but for my selfie, tictoc, snapchat etc. addicted kid the cam and picture quality are the most important part of the whole phone.
However - I’m happy with /e/ and … my daughter is still yelling at me!
Hey thanks for your awesome feedback! pls check the official XDA thread for more details. Especially check the topic “Installation” → Step 4. No gapps! Never. So if you need it choose LOS or any other supporting gapps.
The stretched PREVIEW (the resulting pics / vids are NOT stretched) is a known issue for this device and mentioned in the “Known issues”
Hope you (and maybe one day your daughter) enjoy it anyways
Doh!!
Thanks for your hint and for the info that it is indeed only the cam PREVIEW stretched - not the saved pictures themselves. That could calm my daughters homicidal fury a little
Now that I’ve read attentively the XDA, clearly saying not to install OpenGApps, I definitely regret it.
In fact on my A520F I have the pure /e/ running, and thanks to the pre-installed microG I can use some google apps (Notes, GDrive, youtube) that I find too nice to just leave behind me yet.
At the next occasion I’m going to wipe and re-flash my daughters J530F only with /e/.
Being totally excited after having learned how to flash custom roms into old mobile phones that for any reason I kept in the lower drawer for many years, yesterday I picked and flashed an old Samsung A5 (2015) modelname=SM-A500F with LineageOS 18.1 (since there is no /e/ version for this).
I dropped that phone years ago due to lack of memory and speed - and I wonder now how great it works with LOS.
However, I learned that LOS comes without microG and installing microG is way too challenging for me; I tried but it didn’t work. In the end I flashed OpenGApps and now I have the A500F running LOS with google apps. Off course I’d feel better with microG, and way better with pure /e/ .
Thank you for this great work around this ROM.
I have just flashed a phone on version 1.2 and I notice at the first launch that there is the Google Play Store application installed, isn’t it a bit weird?
I’m very sorry that I’ve overseen your q here. And its a good q!
(also answers @Bristow s q)
The diff is that UNOFFIFIAL is pure /e/ untouched while CUSTOM have some apps added (including a patched google play store) . That should been mentioned in the XDA thread but the whole project was in the transition to become official …which then failed and I forgot about to transfer the descriptions back and add notes for the current state. Sorry for the confusion here. Will be fixed asap!
Note: The play store is able to use the microG backend including the use of paid apps. It can be simply disabled if not needed!
Phonesky is google play store just modified that it works without the google service dependencies. It is still the original google play store. Does that answer your q ?