[HELP THREAD] Samsung Galaxy S4 T Mobile Version | Ask ANY Question | Noob Friendly

Hello T Mobile Galaxy S4 users! I've taken this thread idea from Marlybru, one of the most helpful Recognized Contributors on XDA, who got the idea from Undercover, just to give proper credit where it is due.

The HTC Sensation has had an ongoing Noob Help thread for more than a year now and it's been an invaluable resource to people of all skills levels looking for answers to questions that might get flamed if asked anywhere else.

There are a lot of people joining XDA on daily basis, and there are a lot of repetitive questions being asked which fill up Development Threads and the main Q&A Forum. Post those questions here!.

First things first. I strongly advise you to read this thread before posting ANYTHING ANYWHERE on XDA.

Second The SEARCH button is your best friend. It will go to war with you. It will tuck you in at night. It lives to serve you! Use it! Almost any question you can think up has already been answered on XDA. Before posting in threads see if the Search Button will fine the answer for you. If you can't find the answer or if you don't understand the answer, then come here and the community will do all it can to help you figure it out.

Third. Re-read the Second thing. This cannot be stressed enough.

Fourth. Don't just come here to ask questions. Come back to help others! In a fairly short time many of you who come to this thread to ask super noobie questions will start to get pretty proficient at Android modding. Please keep coming back to this thread to help the next wave of rookies that are coming after you. Remember, you needed your hand held once, pay it forward by holding someone else's hand.

ASK ANY QUESTION HERE
Odin, ROM's, rooting help etc...... you will either get an answer or will get pointed in the right direction.

Please, be aware of the model of your phone when asking questions.

This thread and this entire forum deals with the T Mobile Variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 model SSGH - M919.

Other Samsung Galaxy S4 Variants

• T-MOB SGH-M919
  
• Verizon
  
• Sprint SPH-L720
  
• AT&T SGH-i337
  

No abuse towards noobs or silly questions is tolerated here!

There is no such thing as a dumb question in this thread. If you need to ask how to take the back cover off your phone or how to wipe cache, feel free to ask it here. All questions are welcome.

If you engage in noob bashing here because someone asked a simple question I will search your post history and find the posts you made when you first signed up here about which button turns your phone on and post them here for everyone to laugh at. (By the way, go take a look at my rookie posts. There are some doozies.)

Everyone was new here once,so Noobs New users, please take the time to familiarize yourselves with how things work in the forum by reading this helpful guide. I linked this above, but it's such a great guide on how to be a great XDA Community Member that it's worth linking it twice.

As development continues and we start seeing patterns of repeat questions I'll link answers to the most common questions here in the first couple posts of the thread. So keep an eye out for those updates over the next several months.

Some of the most common questions....

What is the difference between the S4 Development Forum and the S4 Original Development Forum?
The regular development forum is for ROMs based on Samsung's Touchwiz version of Android
The original development forum is for AOSP or other based non Touchwiz ROMs, recoveries, and such

What is Odin?
Odin is a program that lets you flash things to a Samsung mobile device from a PC. It's an invaluable part of modding Samsung devices.
Here is a guide by k0nana about how to use Odin. You can find download links for the software there as well as a few other things.

If you need a little more detail on how to use Odin this is a more detailed write up by Intratech explaining how to use it. (Note, do not download and try to install anything from this thread. That is a thread with GS3 files. If you try to put those on your GS4 you will not be happy. This thread is for information on Odin ONLY!)

How do I root my Galaxy S4?
CF-Auto Root by Chainfire

What ROMs are there for the T Mobile GS4?
Here's a big list of them with links all organized in one place. Thanks to MT3G.

What recoveries are available for the T Mobile SGS4?
ClockworkMod
TWRP
PhilZTouch
OUDHS

What are all these installed apps on the stock ROM that I don't know anything about?
That could be bloatware. Stuff T Mobile and Samsung put on there for a variety of reasons. See this list by Xologist explaining what all those APK's are.

How come my 16GB phone says I have only 5GB available even though I just flashed a fresh ROM?

First off, you never had 16GB free. That's the total memory on the device. That includes the space for the ROM, recovery, bootloader, system files, data, and then what's left over is your user partition which is abou 11GB for you to put photos and music on.

But if you make a nandroid backup using Clockwork Mod Recovery it saves the backup in a hidden directory that uses up a lot of space. (About 1 GB for an AOSP backup and 2 or 3GB for a TouchWiz backup). You can use the CWM Recovery App to find and upload the backup to your computer over Wifi for safe storage. Or you can just delete he backup if you no longer need it.

I bought a phone off Craigslist and the IMEI is bad!

You learned a valuable lesson. Don't buy phones off Craigslist. And don't try to change your IMEI. It is illegal to do so. And don't ask XDA how to change it because we can't discuss that here.

However, if you haven't bought you used phone yet and you are worried about it having a bad IMEI, have the seller meet you at a T Mobile store and get the sales rep to verify its a clean phone with no outstanding payment due and that the IMEI won't be blocked in the future. Just be sure that YOU pick the store to meet at. Don't let the seller pick the store in case he has a T Mobile rep working with him.


THESE POSTS / ARTICLES SHOULD BE CONSIDERED REQUIRED READING FOR ALL NEW ANDROID USERS!!!
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile...plained-boot-system-recovery-data-cache-misc/This is a great write up of how Android is organized under the hood. This is invaluable knowledge to help you get better not just at modding your phone, but for really understanding wha you're doing.

This post by The TechnoCrat explains what most of the common words and phrases you will hear around XDA mean. Things like 'Kernel' and 'Clock Speed' and 'Governors'. If you don't know what terms like that mean, do yourself a favor and read this post. It is like the Rosetta Stone to understanding 95% of threads on XDA.

Another great post by Technocrat that explains the difference between the various available governors.

lordcheeto03 said:

Why exactly does most everyone recommend to let a ROM sit for 5 minutes then reboot on a fresh install?

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Click to collapse

The same reason they say not to swim for an hour after you eat. Because that's what someone else told them and it became urban legend with no basis in reality. (And yes, it is perfectly safe to swim after eating.)

The idea is that the ROM is still installing and 'settling in' for 5-10 minutes after first boot. And that doign other operations interferes with that process.

The reality is that the final stages of a ROM install are that part where it says ANDROID IS UPGRADING during the first boot. When that's done the ROM is installed and ready to use. And even if it did still need to 'settle in' after that it's a computer. It performs operations exactly to spec every time. So you can't really interfere with it by using it. If you tak eup processor time so that a 'settle in' operation cant' complete right away it will just wait a second and perform that task later. That's what the I/O scheduler in the kernel is for.

Additionally this is an ancient rumor, which in the Android world means like 2 years, from the days of single core processors with slow speeds. (You remember the Froyo Android devices that had vacuum tubes and cooling fans, right?) So that final push to finish installing maybe took a little time on those older devices. But on a quad core processor device that has more computing power than more of the old computers you have around your house? That final 'settle in' process would take seconds, even though it doesn't really exist.

So that's why this is out there. It's the same as "calibrating the battery stats" that everyone thinks is so important. Someone said to do it, others believed them, and the next thing you know people assume it's Android Gospel. But it's all just sillyness.

Thread stuck, no trolling, flaming, or off-topic banter please, this is a development site and is here to further development.

Report violations of XDA posting rules immediately and have fun with your contributions.

tpdown said:

Noob here with some questions!

Is it really possible to install CM without rooting? And if they don't recommend it, does that mean I should unroot before following the instructions?

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Click to collapse

Yes. It's completely possible. And easy. Let's clarify what a few thigns mean first...

"Rooting" means giving you access to the system partition of the phone storage. That means the files that run the phone itself as opposed to just your personal data. This is done with an app called Superuser that kind of acts as a gate keeper between the system partition adn the rest of the storage. The only thing that 'rooting' does is install the Superuser app as a system app just like all the apps that came on the phone when you bought it like the phone app and the messenger app, etc (Instead of as a user app like everything you download from the Play store). That's it. Nothing else.

Once that Superuser app is installed it allows or denies permission for other apps to access the system partition of the device. (It prompts you each time an app wants to access the system partition and asks you if you want to lef t it)

If you root the phone using CF Auto Root, again you are only installing the Superuser app. Nothing else. But once the Superuser app is installed you can then use an app like ROM Manager to install a recovery. You will tell ROM Manager to install a recovery and you will get a pop up promot from Superuser saying "Do you really want to let ROM Manager have root access?" You say yes, and it will install the custom recovery.

Recovery is sort of like a mini operating system you can boot into instead of the phone. From inside recovery you always have full root access. You can do anything. Install anything, wipe anything, etc. So once recovery is installed you can then wipe the phone clean and install CyanogenMod.

Doing this will wipe out the Superuser app you installed with CF Auto Root because you will wipe the system partition clean. But it will install a new set of system files in the same sopt and a new copy of Superuser will be included. (Actually on CM10 Superuser is integrated into the ROM framework, but same thing...) So when you boot into CyanogenMod for the first time you will already be rooted and have Superuser. (Well, you'll have the ability to get Superuser. On CM you have check a box in settings to give you root access, but it's as easy as that. No fancy stuff. It's disabled by default.)

What the CyanogenMod team is saying is that since you need Odin or Heimdal to install Superuser using CF Auto Root just so you can use ROM Manager to then flash a recovery, you may as well just use Odin or Heimdal to install a recovery. Then boot right into recovery and flash CyanogenMod.

The short version of all this is that if you ant to go right from bone unrooted stock to CyanogenMod, rooting it first is just an extra step. It won't hurt, but it doesn't help either. Just adds extra steps and time to the process. But there's a downside to doing that, which ties in nicely with your next question....

Doesn't a Nandroid backup make an image of your phone, so you don't need TB to back up apps too?

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Click to collapse

A Nandroid is a full backup of everything. It's like you're own little custom flashable ROM. The data from it isn't really usable unless you flash the entire thing to restore the phone to the same exact state it was in when you made the nandroid.

In other words, while a nandroid will back up all your user and app data, it's not putting it into a usable form for restoring after installing a new ROM. There are apps that let you extract data from a nandroid but it's a pain in the butt.

By rooting the phone first using CF Auto Root and installing Titanium Backup on the stock ROM, you can back up all your apps and user data. Then wipe the phone clean, install CyanogenMod, then install Titanium again and boom...your saved app data will show up in Titanium ready to be restored!

Read up on how to change the storage location in Titanium form EXT SD Card ot Legacy after installing CyanogenMod though or you'll get errors in Titanium. It's super easy. It's just a setting in Titanium. But you have to do it because it's set wrong by default.

CyanogenMod's website says to use "ClockworkMod Recovery, and the Heimdall Suite," is ClockworkMod the same as Nandroid backup?

:silly:

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

No. Yes. Kind of.

A nandroid backup is a saved version of your entire phone. Ssyem data, user data, settings, text messages, contacts, apps, etc....it's like a 'system restore point' if you'd care to use Windows XP jargon.

ClockworkMod is the thing that lets you make a Nandroid backup. You will also see discussion of TWRP Recovery and PhilzTouch. Same thing.