Recently rooted 4.2.2 MJ9 with this method
I waited for several days for a response to my rooting questions and was surprised that there was not one direct reply. I do software development and get frustrated when people don't read instructions and I often let them flounder if they aren't putting forth an effort on their own. But I spent a full day and parts of 3 other days reading these forums, plus I read 80+ books in the last year. No slacker here.
So I went ahead based on the reassuring post from dbenney that this rooting method works and got busy on it. It worked just fine but I thought I would document my experience so that others on the fence will know what to expect.
First of all I just got the Galaxy S4 within the last month. It came with 4.2.2 (MJ9) and the store employee told me to avoid the OTA update which came through on my device as soon as I hooked it up to my home's wifi. He said it was buggy and that 40% of the users who took it have had problems. When I saw the notification for it I held down on the notification, selected App Info from the popup menu and chose to disable further notifications. Based on reading I've done here I do not plan to upgrade to 4.3, I really don't care for the new features beyond 4.2.2. More important, I do not want to be locked in to no backwards compatibility. From all I have read if you update to 4.3 you have no choice but to stay or move forward, no going back. No thank you.
My reason for wanting to root was that I was getting stuck at the Sprint yellow screen on boot. This was before I had even done anything to the phone. I've read that people are getting stuck at the yellow screen and thinking that their rooting activity had something to do with it. I would tend to doubt that rooting is 100% to blame for that because like I said, I had the issue with a brand new phone. I called the Sprint store and they said to do a hard reset which will wipe all my data. Without being rooted I can't use Titanium Backup to restore after a reset so I rooted the phone using the Chainfire method. NOTE: To those wondering if the method has kept up to date, it has. I opened the tar file and saw Jan 10, 2014 mod times on the files it contains so I was sure I hadn't downloaded something old. The links in the docs don't say the file is updated and the dates on the post that contain the links to download the rooting files are mostly from April 2013. Rest assured the rooting methods are updated. All you have to do is open the files you download in 7-Zip and check out the mod times on the files in the zips/tars.
So I rooted, made a backup with Titanium Backup and reset the device. The reset fixed the yellow screen issue. I haven't been stuck on the yellow screen since and I've rebooted at least 25 times since just to convince myself it was resolved. After resetting I re-rooted and restored my backup. The only thing that wasn't restored was my wallpaper, everything else came back perfectly. I recommend using the Snapshot method for restoring files from Titanium Backup. The XML method didn't work as well for me. Titanium Backup will prompt you to make this choice during restore.
You only get the option to disable Knox by going into the SuperSU application. That was mentioned in a previous post. I chose to disable it and it said it disabled it successfully but I'm on 4.2.2 which doesn't come with Knox enabled so I have no idea if it really did or not. Rooting did trip the flash counter but Triangle Away fixed it, however, I'm not convinced that there is a way to get back to unrooted stock without leaving at least some fingerprints. If you are worried about your warranty/Knox capabilities I would not root and would live with plain stock.
I ran into a problem after resetting with the Play store but do not believe it had anything to do with rooting. I kept getting a 920 error saying the download couldn't be completed. I tried a number of things to resolve that but the only thing that worked was going into Applications, finding the Play store app, and uninstalling updates. You can't remove this application but you can tell the phone to uninstall any updates to the app. After that I was able to download again.
After that I moved on to the Wifi hotspot update. I did it exactly as QbKing does in his video where he manually copies the service.* files to the system folder. I rebooted the phone just as it shows in the video and it works like a champ. This was nice because I had already tried and failed to get the Wifi Tethering app I had been using on my Epic 4G to work with the S4.
I also installed the Recovery manager listed in the links and it worked although it appeared to hang the first time going into recovery. I held down the power button to restart the device once or twice and if finally worked. I was probably being impatient on the first try.
The only frustration I have not been able to get past during this process was getting Samba working again. There is another thread from that on XDA so I won't go into a lot of detail about it but the application either doesn't work with 64Gig SD cards, it only will work with FAT filesystems, or some other problem. I tried manually editing the smb.conf file to change the share path, I tried reinstalling, I tried a couple other apps but in the end nothing worked. I really like Samba since it makes moving files back and forth more transparent but there are other ways to sync files to your phone so it is not a crippling limitation, instead it is more of an annoyance.
So now (sans the Samba Server) I have a phone that does exactly what my tweaked out Epic 4G did. Everything seems to be working great. I always had issues with GPS with my 4G but so far I have noticed no problems with the Galaxy S4. Due to the GPS issue I decided going into the S4 that I wanted to stay very close to stock. I have only downloaded apps from the app store. The only non-app store thing I've done is rooted the phone and added the custom recovery using GooManager. Those operations do copy some potentially risky stuff to your device. I installed ROM after ROM on my Epic 4G and they all had one small issue or another. I finally stuck with MarcusantRom, ran it for nearly 2 years before upgrading to the S4.
This about sums up my experience. One thing I didn't include is that I had to reset the phone a few times before nailing everything. There was a little trial and error that went on. I'm a bit particular and I like everything to flow from beginning to end with no intermediate hiccups, so if I made a mistake or didn't like the way something went I would reset the phone and start over. But I think with my experience documented it could save another person some of that hassle. I found QbKing's videos very helpful.
Something else worth mentioning... I also purchased BusyBox Pro ($4.99), SuperSU Pro ($2.49), Triangle Away ($2.49), and Root Checker Pro ($0.99). With 50,000+, 100,000+, 100,000+, 10,000+ downloads respectively there is some serious money in this! ChainFire has sold more than a half million dollars on the Play store with these two apps. BusyBox Pro has sold more than a quarter million. Makes you think twice about your day job.
I appreciate the efforts of all these developers work and I’m happy to support their work.
I hope someone out there finds this helpful.
