Howdy Everyone.
Recently I had to return my LG G Stylo phone and have them give me a replacement phone due to what I can only assume is a random bout of hardware failure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last year I got my first proper Smartphone, an LG G Stylo from MetroPCS. It's not a bad phone at all to start with.
Specs:
It lasted for about 8 months and all of the sudden, the SIM card slot just, died on it. It refused to see any SIM cards, out of the blue, seemingly for no reason at all.
Today, I got it replaced. (which costed 30$, by the way. Bah, I guess that's fair enough)
You guys know me though, I'm a part of this community, so of course I had to hack the thing to bits.
So as soon as I got home, I went through the arduous process of fully re-doing the whole phone and setting it all up again. This time, I took the whole hack it to bits concept a bit farther, doing everything right.
So, what'd I do?
Well the first thing I did was get the thing rooted, naturally. (what'd you expect lol)
So of course, I found a thread on XDA developers, simple one click root setup, install the phone driver, download zip, extract, run script. Simple right? Surprise surprise, nothing goes right, I ended having to borrow my sister's laptop to do the root because my computer wouldn't take the LG driver needed for some reason.
But, in the end: Success! Root was obtained!
So, what's next? Well, a custom recovery of course.
I grabbed the latest compatible TWRP from the link on that XDA Thread and flashed it with Flashify, and of course, did a backup of the whole phone from it. Always make backups! (and backups of your backups too!)
Cool, so what's next, surely Root access and TWRP is enough right?
lol. no. It's Custom ROM time.
But before that, it's worth mentioning my SD card died, and I lost half my sideloaded apps I had backed up, luckily the apps are easy to replace, and the only thing I lost was a couple icons and wallpapers. Remember what I said earlier. BACKUPS OF YOUR BACKUPS.
So I ended up grabbing a spare 32GB Class10 I had sitting in my room from a past use with a Nintendo 3DS and set up TWRP to flash.
So I found a really nice, debloated, deodexed custom rom from GameTheory, called Katana.
To make this clear: My phone was idling warm on stock. STOCK. I had my old one overheat under load because the thing can't stay cool.
On Katana, my new device now runs cold and only heats up under actual load. And I keep a live wallpaper on my home screen. (Blasphemous, I know)
For that, in my opinion, makes this best rom on the device. Includes Xposed, tons of tweaks and improvements to LG Android, it even has fancy boot logo (seen above.)
Absolutely awesome rom, for sure. In my personal setup I opted for a few of the optional components. Particularly:
What's next? install all my apps, I suppose.
My Stock Replacement apps of choice:
- Launcher: Nova Launcher Prime (apparently GameTheory Agrees, as Katana comes with Nova)
- Weather App: Weather Underground
- Music App: GoneMAD Media Player Pro
- File Manager: File Manager HD by Cheetah Mobile (I just like this one, it's not actually that good)
- Email: Inbox by Gmail
- Browser: Google Chrome
- Twitter: Plume Premium
- SMS: Hangouts (with XHangouts Xposed Module)
My favorite root apps:
- SuperSU for root control.
- Lucky Patcher for saving some nickels, dimes and sometimes dollars.
- Disable Service for turning off services I don't want or need (especially Android Update)
- Emoji Switcher because LG's emoji's are ugly.
- AdAway because I don't want my data drained by frivolous crap and I don't want malware.
My favorite Xposed modules:
- A specific test build of AppSettings for 5.1.1: specifically for per-app DPI control, fullscreens control, and a few other tweaks I couldn't live without. (main example: Sonic CD immersive mode fullscreen)
- Lucky Patcher Xposed Module: companion to Lucky Patcher, which uses magic and rainbows to get free in-app purchases on poorly programmed apps.
- Materialize Xposed Installer (does what it says on the tin)
- RootCloak (I'll get into this on in a bit)
- Sensor Disabler, the LG G Stylo has a oversensitive proximity sensor at times, so with this I can just turn it off when I wanna have a conversation while I'm using a headset.
- XHangouts: Tons of tweaks for the hangouts messaging app, which I also use for SMS.
- YouTube AdAway. (again it does what it says on the tin)
One major issue I ran into with reinstalling apps was fucking SnapChat, which refuses to let you log in if you have Xposed installed or it sees root, I guess.
But here's the kicker: If you remove Xposed, use RootCloak Plus to hide root from it, log into snapchat, and then reinstall Xposed (and also I recommend switching to the Xposed version of RootCloak) you'll just stay logged in and it won't give you any trouble. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not even mad, gave me a good reason to update my Xposed Framework from Katana's r75 to the latest r86. Still, what an annoying thing. Fuck Snapchat for trying to screw over hackers. Dicks.
Anyhow after that, I set up my home screen how I wanted it and this is how I'm rolling for a while, until I get more stuff back on here:
Anyhow, thanks for reading my ramble. Hope you enjoyed it.
Recently I had to return my LG G Stylo phone and have them give me a replacement phone due to what I can only assume is a random bout of hardware failure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last year I got my first proper Smartphone, an LG G Stylo from MetroPCS. It's not a bad phone at all to start with.
Specs:
- CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, MSM8916, It's a Quad Core CPU Clocked at 1.21GHz
- GPU: Adreno 306 Clocked at 310MHz
- Screen: 5.7in IPS LCD, 720x1280 (720p)
- RAM: 2GB
- Storage: 16GB internal (has SDXC capable microSD slot for additional storage)
- Price: ~150$, no contract, only need to pay for 1 month of service at the 50$ tier or higher, after that you get a rebate that brought the price down to 150$ and you can lower your plan to 30$.
- 30$ plan is great, gives ya 1GB of 4G LTE a month
It lasted for about 8 months and all of the sudden, the SIM card slot just, died on it. It refused to see any SIM cards, out of the blue, seemingly for no reason at all.
Today, I got it replaced. (which costed 30$, by the way. Bah, I guess that's fair enough)
You guys know me though, I'm a part of this community, so of course I had to hack the thing to bits.
So as soon as I got home, I went through the arduous process of fully re-doing the whole phone and setting it all up again. This time, I took the whole hack it to bits concept a bit farther, doing everything right.
So, what'd I do?
Well the first thing I did was get the thing rooted, naturally. (what'd you expect lol)
So of course, I found a thread on XDA developers, simple one click root setup, install the phone driver, download zip, extract, run script. Simple right? Surprise surprise, nothing goes right, I ended having to borrow my sister's laptop to do the root because my computer wouldn't take the LG driver needed for some reason.
But, in the end: Success! Root was obtained!
So, what's next? Well, a custom recovery of course.
I grabbed the latest compatible TWRP from the link on that XDA Thread and flashed it with Flashify, and of course, did a backup of the whole phone from it. Always make backups! (and backups of your backups too!)
Cool, so what's next, surely Root access and TWRP is enough right?
lol. no. It's Custom ROM time.
But before that, it's worth mentioning my SD card died, and I lost half my sideloaded apps I had backed up, luckily the apps are easy to replace, and the only thing I lost was a couple icons and wallpapers. Remember what I said earlier. BACKUPS OF YOUR BACKUPS.
So I ended up grabbing a spare 32GB Class10 I had sitting in my room from a past use with a Nintendo 3DS and set up TWRP to flash.
So I found a really nice, debloated, deodexed custom rom from GameTheory, called Katana.
To make this clear: My phone was idling warm on stock. STOCK. I had my old one overheat under load because the thing can't stay cool.
On Katana, my new device now runs cold and only heats up under actual load. And I keep a live wallpaper on my home screen. (Blasphemous, I know)
For that, in my opinion, makes this best rom on the device. Includes Xposed, tons of tweaks and improvements to LG Android, it even has fancy boot logo (seen above.)
Absolutely awesome rom, for sure. In my personal setup I opted for a few of the optional components. Particularly:
- CyanogenMod AudioFX Panel
- Deodexed LG Live Wallpaper Selector (stock bloat?)
- Deodexed LG Clock App (stock bloat)
What's next? install all my apps, I suppose.
My Stock Replacement apps of choice:
- Launcher: Nova Launcher Prime (apparently GameTheory Agrees, as Katana comes with Nova)
- Weather App: Weather Underground
- Music App: GoneMAD Media Player Pro
- File Manager: File Manager HD by Cheetah Mobile (I just like this one, it's not actually that good)
- Email: Inbox by Gmail
- Browser: Google Chrome
- Twitter: Plume Premium
- SMS: Hangouts (with XHangouts Xposed Module)
My favorite root apps:
- SuperSU for root control.
- Lucky Patcher for saving some nickels, dimes and sometimes dollars.
- Disable Service for turning off services I don't want or need (especially Android Update)
- Emoji Switcher because LG's emoji's are ugly.
- AdAway because I don't want my data drained by frivolous crap and I don't want malware.
My favorite Xposed modules:
- A specific test build of AppSettings for 5.1.1: specifically for per-app DPI control, fullscreens control, and a few other tweaks I couldn't live without. (main example: Sonic CD immersive mode fullscreen)
- Lucky Patcher Xposed Module: companion to Lucky Patcher, which uses magic and rainbows to get free in-app purchases on poorly programmed apps.
- Materialize Xposed Installer (does what it says on the tin)
- RootCloak (I'll get into this on in a bit)
- Sensor Disabler, the LG G Stylo has a oversensitive proximity sensor at times, so with this I can just turn it off when I wanna have a conversation while I'm using a headset.
- XHangouts: Tons of tweaks for the hangouts messaging app, which I also use for SMS.
- YouTube AdAway. (again it does what it says on the tin)
One major issue I ran into with reinstalling apps was fucking SnapChat, which refuses to let you log in if you have Xposed installed or it sees root, I guess.
But here's the kicker: If you remove Xposed, use RootCloak Plus to hide root from it, log into snapchat, and then reinstall Xposed (and also I recommend switching to the Xposed version of RootCloak) you'll just stay logged in and it won't give you any trouble. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not even mad, gave me a good reason to update my Xposed Framework from Katana's r75 to the latest r86. Still, what an annoying thing. Fuck Snapchat for trying to screw over hackers. Dicks.
Anyhow after that, I set up my home screen how I wanted it and this is how I'm rolling for a while, until I get more stuff back on here:
Anyhow, thanks for reading my ramble. Hope you enjoyed it.
Rotflmao 
