I was given an old Samsung S4 for use at work recently, for scanning QR codes with primarily.
I’m an iPhone guy, so am lost with Android, but the version it was locked to was ancient and massively out of date. I did a bit of research, and after a few hours of trial and error I’ve got it running on Lineage 14.1, with a few useful apps downloaded from F-Droid. It’s gone from an old hunk of trash to a perfectly usable device that won’t win any awards for its benchmarks, but is spot on for what i need it to do.
Only 14.1? Now granted, there’s so many different models that it might not apply to all of them, but the european/and qualcomm jfltexx for instance runs 18.1 just fine
(well, it’s showing its age with Android 11, but still very usable)
Yeah, it might be able to go newer, but as I said, Android is an alien land to me, and what I seemed to find on XDA Forums was that this particular model of S4* is only supported as far as 14.1. There’s so much info out there that it’s too easy to get overwhelmed, so I got to a point that enabled what I needed and left it. Willing to accept any further advice, mind.
*Turns out there are several variations of S4, ranging from the I9500 Exynos processor one I have here, to several different versions running Qualcomm silicon.
Yeah, it was disappointing to say the least to see people on YouTube showing how to install 18.1 on an S4, then discovering that this one can only go up to 14.1. But that’s still two Android versions more recent than the official support, so I’ll take it.
I was given an old Samsung S4 for use at work recently, for scanning QR codes with primarily.
I’m an iPhone guy, so am lost with Android, but the version it was locked to was ancient and massively out of date. I did a bit of research, and after a few hours of trial and error I’ve got it running on Lineage 14.1, with a few useful apps downloaded from F-Droid. It’s gone from an old hunk of trash to a perfectly usable device that won’t win any awards for its benchmarks, but is spot on for what i need it to do.
Only 14.1? Now granted, there’s so many different models that it might not apply to all of them, but the european/and qualcomm jfltexx for instance runs 18.1 just fine
(well, it’s showing its age with Android 11, but still very usable)
Yeah, it might be able to go newer, but as I said, Android is an alien land to me, and what I seemed to find on XDA Forums was that this particular model of S4* is only supported as far as 14.1. There’s so much info out there that it’s too easy to get overwhelmed, so I got to a point that enabled what I needed and left it. Willing to accept any further advice, mind.
*Turns out there are several variations of S4, ranging from the I9500 Exynos processor one I have here, to several different versions running Qualcomm silicon.
Ah, the Exynos variant. It’s not even listed as being supported at all, so good to hear that it worked anyway
Yeah, it was disappointing to say the least to see people on YouTube showing how to install 18.1 on an S4, then discovering that this one can only go up to 14.1. But that’s still two Android versions more recent than the official support, so I’ll take it.
Better than nothing, that’s for sure.