Hello community,
I wish to upgrade my Samsung Galaxy A52 from e/OS 1.17 with Android 12 to the new 2.6.3 with Android 14. I have done some reading, but still I don’t feel fully confident to get it all correct. A dirty upgrade seems not to be possible. Here is what I understand that I need to do. Can you please correct me where I am wrong?
Backup everything
Factory reset
Install latest official Android 14 Firmware
Boot it at least once
Unlock Bootloader (I guess it is getting relocked on factory reset?)
Install e/OS recovery
Install e/OS from recovery
Restore app data. Big question here is, if that is possible at all. Could I restore my apps from a backup I made with “adb backup -apk -shared -all -f backup.ab”? Or would that not work after a Version upgrade? This is especially important for me, since otherwise I could not use my banking apps for many days
Or am I wrong and could possibly do a dirty upgrade by just adding the vendor firmware somehow?
Unfortunately my understanding is not deep enough to interpret your image. Is it because the “vendor.patch.dat” size is 0?
Could it be replaced by some file from the original vendor firmware?
Or do I misunterstand it completely?
No problem here, because “vendor.new.dat.br” size is 332,8MB
I am not sure, But what lead me to not recommand dirty upgrade
from “e-X.XX-t-” to “e-X.XX-u-” for this device is the lack of a called /firmware folder containing the needed parts relative to current Android 14 stock firmware as a base for upgrading it along the custom OS /system replacement
here an “android T 13” based /e/OS version for another Samsung device the s10e (exynos) :
e-2.3-t-20240819427106-dev-beyond0lte.zip
Bearing in mind that you say you are currently on Android 12 (S) …
You could dig into the install and META-INF directories of the downloaded ROM, then chase down to updater and specifically the updater-script which will open in a text editor. Now you could look for the text (or similar) which I observerved
Edit I downloaded e-2.6.3-u-20241217455570-community-a52q.zip and opened from the extracted folder e-2.6.3-u-20241217455570-community-a52q/META-INF/com/google/android/updater-script
The updater-script starts
assert(getprop("ro.product.device") == "a52q" || getprop("ro.build.product") == "a52q" || abort("E3004: This package is for device: a52q; this device is " + getprop("ro.product.device") + "."););
assert(samsung_sm7125.verify_bootloader_min("C") == "1" || abort("ERROR: This package requires Android 13 based firmware. Please upgrade firmware and retry!"););
