Upgrade to Lollipop or pass?

[Renegade334]

Well, it appears Samsung is finally rolling out Android 5.0.1 Lollipop (PDA build: N910FXXU1BOB4) to the Galaxy Note 4 in Europe (the update is only available in Germany ATM, though), but for some time now I've been on the fence as to whether I should make the jump from the stable KitKat to the brand new, teething Lollipop. The new OS version has had a shaky start, especially on Google's Nexus 6 flagship, with rather annoying bugs such as debilitating memory leaks, though many of them have now been fixed in 5.0.1 and 5.0.2.

However, I hear, partly from people who have managed to flash their Note 4 with Lollipop, that there are still a few annoyances with KitKat->Lollipop upgrades, such as battery drains (strange, the ART that replaces Dalvik should actually guarantee better battery life, since it ditches JIT compilation), some app crashes, the butchering of the silent mode (HTC apparently fixed this on its own ROMs, though), etc.


So, for those who have a phone already sporting Android 5.0 (preferably a legit OTA update, but flashed custom ROMs are okay, too), is it okay upgrading now or should I wait until at least 5.1 before crossing the Rubicon? I know it's possible to downgrade Samsung phone kernels and rollback to a previous build using a piece of software known as ODIN, but I'd rather stay away from the ROM flashing business. Not to mention, I'm currently rather content with the stable KitKat 4.4.4, so I'm pondering whether the upgrade is necessary.

[Miles Teg]

From what I have personally seen for the moment :
Nexus 7 2013 : no problem (5.0.2)
Nexus 7 2012 : Slower than before but can be used without problem (5.0.2)
Nexus 5 : I don't have it anymore. I didn't encounter any of the problems visible on the net but I have been using Android 5 on it for a long time so I don't really remember how that was with kitkat
Moto X 2014 : Android 5 works better on it than on the Nexus 5

I have seen a Galaxy S4 advance going from 4.3 to 5.0 and the user now wants to go back because the phone is (extremely) slow when opening apps.

From all of that, I can only say to wait until enough people have done the upgrade to see how the phone works because it looks like each model react very differently to Lollipop.

For Samsung phone Odin works very well

[larethian]

Originally Posted by Miles Teg

From what I have personally seen for the moment :
Nexus 7 2013 : no problem (5.0.2)
Nexus 7 2012 : Slower than before but can be used without problem (5.0.2)
Nexus 5 : I don't have it anymore. I didn't encounter any of the problems visible on the net but I have been using Android 5 on it for a long time so I don't really remember how that was with kitkat
Moto X 2014 : Android 5 works better on it than on the Nexus 5

I have seen a Galaxy S4 advance going from 4.3 to 5.0 and the user now wants to go back because the phone is (extremely) slow when opening apps.

From all of that, I can only say to wait until enough people have done the upgrade to see how the phone works because it looks like each model react very differently to Lollipop.

For Samsung phone Odin works very well

Huh? Has it been that long? I happened to be in California and driving around Silicon Valley while they were replacing that Kikat lawn statue (just dug out brown soil there on the lawn at Googleplex). And I remembered it was just late October last year......

[Miles Teg]

Originally Posted by larethian

Huh? Has it been that long? I happened to be in California and driving around Silicon Valley while they were replacing that Kikat lawn statue (just dug out brown soil there on the lawn at Googleplex). And I remembered it was just late October last year......

A long time was probably too strong but I have been using it since the second developer preview was released, so since August 2014.

[Renegade334]

So I guess it'll be a pass... Bah, I don't think I'll be missing much anyway; if something ain't broken (4.4.4) there's no need to replace it (5.0.1).

[Renegade334]

Update: well, I woke up this morning and received a notification that Lollipop for my SM-N910F Galaxy Note 4 was available. AP: N910FXXUBOC5 / CSC: N910FLUX1BOB1

DL'ed it through Wi-Fi (had too many USB hangups to trust the Kies method and risk bricking the phone) and went through with the update, even wiping the cache partition in recovery mode afterwards to get rid of some clutter.

My N4 felt a bit stutter-y at first but a simple reboot eliminated that, and the overall experience does seem faster. My only complaint is that my The Simpsons: Tapped Out game sometimes has stuttering animation (moving around the map is also somewhat impeded by this problem), whereas on KitKat it was perfectly smooth...but apparently if you commence a brand new map/playthrough, everything is as smooth as a newborn's cheek, but if you have the bad luck of already having a large city with lots of buildings and characters unlocked, the game will start to exhibit performance degradation...so, apparently, the roots of this issue are found in Electronic Arts and not Android itself. A bit annoying considering every other app on my phone feels more responsive, really.

Other than that, I'm rather satisfied with Lollipop thus far; I'll have to see whether the earlier reports of battery drain for N4 check out and, if so, I'll consider doing a factory reset (which reportedly does help sometimes, but that was for early 5.0 builds...dunno about 5.0.1). #fingerscrossed

[Renegade334]

Severe apologies for this instance of thread necromancy, but I suppose I might as well put a friendly warning to other fellow Note 4 (and Android handset) owners out there.

I've decided today to roll back to KitKat 4.4.4 using Odin 3.10.6 after more than a month of Lollipop. I've enjoyed Lollipop's responsiveness and UI dynamism but I've been otherwise seriously aggrieved by the unexpectedly HIGHER battery drain the new OS version seems to cause. Some helpful souls out there have suggested wiping the cache partition to help the OS clear its junk and concentrate on the most recent and essential files, but that counsel was only a short-lived illusion of a fix; my daily battery consumption has practically doubled, even though my phone is configured practically exactly as my KitKat was (the upgrade spared my user files/profile, so I didn't have to redo everything from the ground up), even with power saving and background data restriction enabled. It was just too annoying.

It seems that Lollipop, in the end, was a botched OS on several counts; Google claims to have fixed problems in its 5.1 version (reportedly slated for the N4 somewhere around end of July), but I'm afraid that only concerns the memory leak issue, it doesn't remedy the higher power consumption, apparently caused (at least in part) by an extremely hungry Google Play Services and Google Now. The promises of lower battery consumption (made possible through ART) just didn't bear out and today I had my fill. Google now once again claims that its Android M (the future Android 6.0) will bring even better battery life by cutting down on background services when the screen is automatically turned off, but I now know better than to prematurely rejoice. We know what eventually happened with the boy who cried wolf.

So I used ODIN (be mighty careful with this, you COULD brick your phone if you go about like a headless chicken) to return to KitKat and...entered a bootscreen loop. I withdrew the battery, flashed the phone back to Lollipop (again, using the official ROM for my phone version and country code) and was surprised to see the reboot completing without a hitch. So I reflashed back to 4.4.4 and finally realized, to my great pain, that the downgrade required a FACTORY RESET (yes, data reset, not just cache wipe) that would wipe out my user profile and settings, thus preventing me from enjoying my phone from the get-go.

So now I'm busy refurbishing its settings and app lineup.

My advice: be extremely careful when your phone offers a Lollipop upgrade. There are pros and cons, and unfortunately for Note 4, there are big downsides with this upgrade...enough to convince me that KitKat was the way to go.

[IceHism]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

Severe apologies for this instance of thread necromancy, but I suppose I might as well put a friendly warning to other fellow Note 4 (and Android handset) owners out there.

I've decided today to roll back to KitKat 4.4.4 using Odin 3.10.6 after more than a month of Lollipop. I've enjoyed Lollipop's responsiveness and UI dynamism but I've been otherwise seriously aggrieved by the unexpectedly HIGHER battery drain the new OS version seems to cause. Some helpful souls out there have suggested wiping the cache partition to help the OS clear its junk and concentrate on the most recent and essential files, but that counsel was only a short-lived illusion of a fix; my daily battery consumption has practically doubled, even though my phone is configured practically exactly as my KitKat was (the upgrade spared my user files/profile, so I didn't have to redo everything from the ground up), even with power saving and background data restriction enabled. It was just too annoying.

It seems that Lollipop, in the end, was a botched OS on several counts; Google claims to have fixed problems in its 5.1 version (reportedly slated for the N4 somewhere around end of July), but I'm afraid that only concerns the memory leak issue, it doesn't remedy the higher power consumption, apparently caused (at least in part) by an extremely hungry Google Play Services and Google Now. The promises of lower battery consumption (made possible through ART) just didn't bear out and today I had my fill. Google now once again claims that its Android M (the future Android 6.0) will bring even better battery life by cutting down on background services when the screen is automatically turned off, but I now know better than to prematurely rejoice. We know what eventually happened with the boy who cried wolf.

So I used ODIN (be mighty careful with this, you COULD brick your phone if you go about like a headless chicken) to return to KitKat and...entered a bootscreen loop. I withdrew the battery, flashed the phone back to Lollipop (again, using the official ROM for my phone version and country code) and was surprised to see the reboot completing without a hitch. So I reflashed back to 4.4.4 and finally realized, to my great pain, that the downgrade required a FACTORY RESET (yes, data reset, not just cache wipe) that would wipe out my user profile and settings, thus preventing me from enjoying my phone from the get-go.

So now I'm busy refurbishing its settings and app lineup.

My advice: be extremely careful when your phone offers a Lollipop upgrade. There are pros and cons, and unfortunately for Note 4, there are big downsides with this upgrade...enough to convince me that KitKat was the way to go.

I mean, you're using a Samsung rom and not a custom rom lol. Samsung is behind, you can always just flash a new cyanogen 5.1.1 rom and install xposed modules to get good battery life.

Also android M is going to be better because they are basically introducing permission controls or Sony's super stamina mode into the official build which prevents all wakelocks outside of ones that you specifically allow.

Also, Google play doesn't take more power, its just waking up your phone more.

[Renegade334]

Originally Posted by IceHism

I mean, you're using a Samsung rom and not a custom rom lol. Samsung is behind, you can always just flash a new cyanogen 5.1.1 rom and install xposed modules to get good battery life.

Sorry, but I'd like to keep the warranty intact. I don't know how exactly my shop (whose staff I actually appreciate) handles the return process (never had to bring a device back so far), so I don't know whether they check if the KNOX value (which determines whether the device is official and thus eligible for updates) has been irreversibly tripped or not. I doubt they're just going to say "oh, doesn't work anymore, no worries, here's a replacement" without actually fiddling around and checking whether I didn't do something puerile that voided the warranty.

Also android M is going to be better because they are basically introducing permission controls or Sony's super stamina mode into the official build which prevents all wakelocks outside of ones that you specifically allow.

The thing is, Google trumpeted that Lollipop would offer better battery life because of how ART uses precompiled code rather than JIT code; the idea of wakelock reduction in Android M is certainly very enticing to the ears, but you have to be careful about promises and how the developers' endeavors ultimately translate in reality. That's the lesson Lollipop brought us.

Also, Google play doesn't take more power, its just waking up your phone more.

Thereby drawing more power, compared to earlier builds.

[IceHism]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

Sorry, but I'd like to keep the warranty intact. I don't know how exactly my shop (whose staff I actually appreciate) handles the return process (never had to bring a device back so far), so I don't know whether they check if the KNOX value (which determines whether the device is official and thus eligible for updates) has been irreversibly tripped or not. I doubt they're just going to say "oh, doesn't work anymore, no worries, here's a replacement" without actually fiddling around and checking whether I didn't do something puerile that voided the warranty.

The thing is, Google trumpeted that Lollipop would offer better battery life because of how ART uses precompiled code rather than JIT code; the idea of wakelock reduction in Android M is certainly very enticing to the ears, but you have to be careful about promises and how the developers' endeavors ultimately translate in reality. That's the lesson Lollipop brought us.

Thereby drawing more power, compared to earlier builds.

Hmm I see. I know you can root and install xposed on kit Kat without tripping Knox but I'm not sure about Lollipop.
Personally, if I wanted a phone I didn't want to tamper, I would just get an iPhone but meh

Android kernel is open source for a reason. If developers aren't going to fix their problems then the community will and hopefully the developers make note of it for next official builds

But using precompiled code instead of JIT wasn't really the biggest problem to begin with. Just look at how much memory leaks android have. Its really just Java and its garbage collector not being a very good language.

And I don't think that the note 4 is going to get android m considering Samsung but we'll see. My tab4 hasn't gotten lollipop yet lmao

[Renegade334]

Note 4 is already slated for 5.1; there are pictures by beta-testers and insiders (Sammobile) showing N4s rocking the actual 5.1, but apparently that builds only fixes some memory leaks, not excessive battery drains. It's poor consolation.

Note 3 was originally shipped with 4.3, upgraded to 4.4 and finally 5.0, whereas its predecessor, the Note 2, first came out with 4.1.1, is currently on 4.4.2 and is eligible for 5.0...so it IS possible that Samsung will upgrade the N4 to 5.1 and then to 6.0, if Google rolls out Android M quickly enough that the phablet is not eclipsed by more recent models like the upcoming Note 5 (to be unveiled later this year IIRC). It's already bad enough that Samsung is currently utterly spellbound by its S6/Edge (no microSD and removable battery and a price tag even higher than the Note 4? Vade retro Satanas! VADE RETRO!) and is more or less forgetting about older handsets.

Just finished re-customizing my N4 and I can already tell the games (TS:TO, especially) have MUCH smoother animation (though, one could argue the EA programmers simply didn't optimize their game for Lollipop). Now to test the battery...

[Miles Teg]

The cause of the battery drain has probably been found : https://code.google.com/p/android/is...tail?id=165558

The drain seems to be coming from the code taking care of the modem.

[Renegade334]

It's more than just the modem, I'm afraid.

Case in point: I fully recharged my N4 (freshly brought back to 4.4.4) this morning, almost precisely twelve hours ago and my battery is now stable at 97%; power saving and background data restriction are enabled and mobile data is turned off. With Lollipop, even with MD off, and PS and BDR on (or, to be more specific, all data-sipping apps manually background-restricted), I'd be somewhere around 93-92% after half a day with the same amount of activity (nothing much to do on weekends, I must confess, but still). The difference is VERY noticeable once you've made the step back, and yeah, I appreciate gaining at least one full day of battery life before reaching my recharge point (somewhere around 40%): it means I'm ultimately increasing my battery's lifespan (the total amount of times you can theoretically recharge it before it finally dies) and the device's life expectancy.

The only two Lollipop things I miss right now are the quicker UI responsiveness (Lollipop felt really snappy) and the fact that the Samsung S Health app cannot restore user data collected on its Lollipop-exclusive version (S Health v4.x) back to its earlier KitKat version (S Health v3.5.x); it appears the info is not backwards-convertible, which is a pity. I don't do workouts or anything physically extravagant (aside from walking long distances), but the app does give me an idea of how active or lazy I am during the day/week (IOW, it tells me when to stop being a lazy oaf).

But, hey, all things considered, it's a good bargain.