Toward the end of last month we showed you guys a look at an ICS port that was being built for various Galaxy S device. My primary interest in this port was the fact that they had a Vibrant version. Being a faithful Vibrant owner, I had to give it a go. The ROM moved to beta 2 only a few days after the initial release. Bringing with it some need changes. But even with these changes I kept running into a few issues. Not knowing if it was user error, a bad flash or issues in the ROM I started exploring all possibilities that I could do my self. Which is pretty limited since I am not a developer of any sorts. I did however discover a few things that I think may have been causing my issues that some of you may never have thought about.
From general experience, a high majority of us use Titanium Backup to back up our apps and associated data so we don’t lose our progress on games or have to reinstall them 1 by 1. Although it is a great time saver, I think it was the root of my issues. After having FC issues with apps and gapps starting to close out, I became rather frustrated. Not a big deal, wiping the cache and Dalvik usually fixed it. It would eventually re-present itself 4 or 5 hours later. The second issue I had that seemed to occur was the drop and function of service. It would essentially freeze leaving me with no coverage. A reboot solved this as well. Still, an annoyance. So I got to thinking about past experiences with other devices and ROMs. Thinking permission issues. Fixing permissions seemed to do no good. I am not even sure if you can fix permission yet on ICS. My next thought was gapps issues. Since that is where I got FC issues that ultimately made me reflash a few times. What I didn’t expect was 18 hours with no issues after the last flash.
Which got me to thinking, what did I do this time that I didn’t do before. I didn’t restore any apps yet. I got so busy with my day that I forgot to restore my apps. This time instead of restoring them via TB, I went to the market and pulled up a few free apps that I use. To my surprise many of the apps I use often give a snazzy little, “this app is not supported by your device” message. Which then doesn’t allow me to download it. I found this issue on Astro, EStrong File manager, Kindle and a whole slew of other apps that I use. Knowing that the ROM is an I9000 ROM and having flashed other builds of 2.3 that were from an I9000 without ever running into this issue I came to the conclusion that many of the apps available don’t support ICS yet.
I wonder though, anyone out there sporting a Galaxy Nexus finding basic apps in the market not available for your device? I would love to know if this was truly my issue or if the last flash just went better than the last 5.
Leave a comment or any suggestions you might have below. I know I would love to hear them.
About the Author
Restoring data with the app makes it worse. I found that out going from gingerbread to honeycomb while testing roms on gtablet. Titanium is great but not foolproof…
Good point. I knew something was up, but couldn’t figure it out. I am sure there are other factors at play. But since I haven’t had major issues in such a long time now, I blame a a lot of it on the restore part. things are running great now.
As I had mentioned I ran to a big issue with the radio not initializing and no service and could not find any solution. End result is I had to odin and I will attempt to flash again. I did email Raymond though from the googlecode project of the ICS you recommended and he replied telling me that my issue is a known typo in the install script and gave me the solution.
Below I will paste his replies in case anyone else runs into this issue and googles for the answer to radio off on ICS:
“Yes the issue is known,its a typo in onecosmic’s installer script that for some reason only affects some phones,mine included. Odin to stock,get root and in either a terminal emulator or advanced shell run as root “cat /dev/block/stl3 > /sdcard/efsbackup.img” then flash to cm7,let it convert bml to mtd,then flash ics,if you’re having issues with the radio,back in a shell run “cat /sdcard/efsbackup.img > /dev/block/stl3″ then reboot. Feel free to post this on xda also.”
Try ICS Passion v5. A much more mature and stable ICS for the Vibrant IMO. I’ve been flashing a few times a day trying different kernels and such and alwyas wipe so I do a lot of restores with titanium. It’s only the ICS incompatable apps that fail.
Changing your LCD density causes this issue set it back to 240 and wipe cache in market. Nuff said noob.
I had the same problems that everyone else experienced. Ultimately, my radio just didn’t work no matter what I did forcing me to restore my 2.3 GB build. Manually changing your DPI will introduce a whole slew of other problems so that isn’t necessarily a good fix.
I’ll check out ICS Passion next.