An Easy Guide to Installing a Custom Rom on the Samsung Galaxy s4 i9505

This guide is particularly geared towards Australian model released i9505. The following was dont on the Telstra 4g phone, however this should work fine for any i9505 from any Australian carrier.

Do you hate your Samsung Galaxy s4 ? So did i… well it a shame because it is only until you root and install a custom rom that you will truly see it’s potential in more ways than one.

In this guide i will give you an easy guide on how to install a custom rom on your Samsung Galaxy s4 i9505 that took me a couple sleepless night of research to get down pat before actually delving into it.

It really is a lot easier than it sounds, reading some forum posts will easily get you confused to even know what to download but once you do have the right resources its quite easy.

Why would you want to install a custom rom ?

1. The responsiveness of your phone will be unlike anything you have seen

2. You will be getting rid of the lame samsung software which i never liked anyway, and you never had the choice to uninstall

3. No bloat software preinstalled that you have choice to uninstall

4. Highly clean an optimized version of a pure Google Android OS

5. Powerful tweaks that are not available to normal Samsung firmware

Probably heaps more but i don’t want to keep preaching.

Without a doubt the biggest and single most profound difference was the speed of the phone, i honestly thought that this was how it was suppose to be and lived with it like many do, but it is not until you install a pure Google Android OS that you really see the potential of the s4.

Note: By installing a custom rom (any rom) you will lose some features that are exclusive to the Samsung TouchWiz interface such as those air gestures, eye  scrolling and other Samsung features, if you never used them then you won’t miss them.

You always have the option of going back to stock if you take a Nandroid backup.

Without further ado, lets get this shit on the road.

Installation instructions

The following instructions will install any custom rom, however i chose to install one that was highly rated and most recommended, i can confirm it works well with Telstra phones, i did not have to update APN’s, or reconfigure MMS, SMS settings, everything worked out of the box 🙂

1. Get into developer download mode instructions here

2. Root your phone 🙂 instructions here

3. Install Philz touch recovery instructions here

4. Perform a Nandroid backup incase of a disaster or you want to go back to your previous settings instructions here

5. Perform a full wipe and install custom rom, instructions here

The next set of instructions are not necessary and may not even be available anymore in the newer version of Android such as v5 lollipop so unless your using an older version of Android v4.x Kit Kat disregard the following steps

6. Open app drawer and open Xposed, press the framework button and install the framework, reboot your device

7. Open Xposed one again and enter the module menu and enable gravity box, reboot for final time

8. Open Gravity Box for a plethora of new tweaks

9. Enjoy your new Google android phone the way it should’ve been out of the box 🙂