[Q] If no roms support my phone, what can I do?

I have the ZTE Avail 2 (aka Z992) (and it sucks, considering it's a $70 phone, buying a new one isn't an option because I just built a computer). It hasn't had an update since 4.1.1 and it's very slow, (usually have only ~50mb of ram free when just sitting at launcher) even with all of the tricks to speed it up (greenfiy, cleaner, etc) and on top of that, it's loaded with features that ZTE put in that suck. So after searching and searching for a custom ROM with support for my phone, I can confirm there is zero. I looked at the rom dev tutorial - http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1272270 and the kitchen program doesn't support my phone either. Does that mean I'm screwed? If there's a way to make a rom compatible other than the android kitchen or straight up learning to program, please tell me. I'm willing to learn anything that isn't hugely time consuming. Thanks for any replies.

Thank you! So I found CM for the xperia tipo, which was on the list of similar devices. I should use that one and change whatever needs to be changed, right?
Also, is it possible to do that for 4.4 stock? That may be a better idea if CM consumes too much ram

tuxboy said:

No, you are not. You can try many other porting tutorials around the web. I found a list of phones similar to yours, might come in handy.

In fact, since your are trying to "port" ROMs, just think about the fact that "where did those ROMs come from?" Those ROMs were built from source code. The Android project is open source and if you are feeling adventurous, you can just grab the source code and compile it yourself for your device. It might be very easy or very tough, depending on your device. I would advise you to try to build Cyanogenmod 10.1 from source code. Check here and here.

And make sure to check this (must).

Cheers man! Trust me, trying to build Cyanogenmod from source will be a lot of fun!

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Okay, ignore my last replies, I've been reading a lot and kind of know what I'm doing now.
Only problem is, I can't find a stock rom of my phone! The closest thing I found was a custom ROM for a phone similar to mine, which is confirmed working to the one I actually have. So would that do okay? androidforums . com/prelude-all-things-root/795640-azazel-rom-z993-aio.html is the one. Thanks again for any help.

tuxboy said:

You can easily take a backup of your current ROM. Try booting into recovery and making your own custom recovery (ClockWordMod).

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Oh, I didn't know that would work, thanks again! I have my rom modded like crazy though, tons of xposed modules and build.prop edits, also I uninstalled a lot of stock apps - I'm sure I could get the build.prop somewhere, but what about the other things? Do they matter at all?

Edit: after the backup I now have a ton of tars, a recovery.img, and a boot.img. I extracted all of the tars, now do I just put all of the folders from the tars in a folder with the imgs and that's my base rom?

tuxboy said:

You can easily take a backup of your current ROM. Try booting into recovery and making your own custom recovery (ClockWordMod).

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Click to collapse

Okay, I've come pretty far and I've made several flashable zips and fixed many errors, but there's one thing I can't figure out - the updater script doesn't work, and I realized it's because I was using the one from the original port, and I need the one for my phone, which I can't get from the cwm recovery. I really need the whole META-INF folder. Where can I get that?