Galaxy S4: kitkat 4.4.2 is a horrible update

[Fuego]

I'm on AT&T on the S4 I337 platform and haven't received the KitKat update yet. I have 'moved' as many apps to the SD card as possible either before or just after 4.3 MK2 and have been quite happy with my stock S4. Having moved apps to the SD card have I set myself up for failure with this update? How does one delay/avoid installing it? Oh, and does a factory reset drop all the apps and customizations you've done? Please forgive if that seems a n00b question as I've not had a reason to reset mine in 9 months.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

[monsieurms]

Permit me to shiver in humiliation, but I decided I'd try the upgrade on my phone. I don't run apps on my card.

Everything went fine! I took advice here and removed the card first. When the card was reinserted and the device rebooted it, everything worked fine. There were only two minor and readily fixable setup issues: (a) the resizeable calendar widget I use disappeared. No biggie. I just reinstalled it and it immediately returned, with all settings maintained, which made it even easier. (b) Some programs, like TripAdvisor City Guides, disappeared from custom folders I had them in. Also no biggie. That was easily fixed.

That's all folks. Gps works fine. Everything seems fine.

Truthfully, though, I'm still wondering why I bothered. It is nice, but doesn't seem to be of any huge benefit, even if the risk was less than portrayed. But it worked out.

I'm humiliated that I succumbed to upgrade-itis. Sob. I have a problem. Still trying to resist re: my 2014 tablet. It seems less important there anyway.

 

[Remaxmatt]

Updated my S4 to KitKat yesterday, haven't had any of the issues mentioned here, however there's this lockscreen bug that if I unlock my phone, I'll get a split second view of my home screen wallpaper fading out even if I locked my phone whilst being in an app. My home screen and lockscreen wallpapers differ of course. I've narrowed it down to my music players (the stock one and Google Play Music), whenever I play music and the music player control widget would be on my lockscreen, I don't see the bug anymore. Really annyoing.. :'(

The ONLY issue that I had was regarding the unlock screen. My issue was a very serious lag, and it not always unlocking, so slightly different than your issue (it sounds). Restarting my phone resolved it. It's been several days since I did that, and the problem hasn't returned, so it looks like the simplest solution worked for me.

I know it's probably a stupid question, but have you tried simply restarting your phone? Or doing a battery pull?

Using my S4

 

[monsieurms]

It's just so annoying, does it go away when playing music?

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Have to tell you (irony!)--upgraded. It seems completely gone now. I never much cared, but the upgrade seems to have improved that minor issue.

 

[TowersVault]

The ONLY issue that I had was regarding the unlock screen. My issue was a very serious lag, and it not always unlocking, so slightly different than your issue (it sounds). Restarting my phone resolved it. It's been several days since I did that, and the problem hasn't returned, so it looks like the simplest solution worked for me.

I know it's probably a stupid question, but have you tried simply restarting your phone? Or doing a battery pull?

Using my S4

Yep, I gave it a go. This morning I discovered that you can fix it with the window animation scale in the Dev settings. The bug seems to be linked to timing of when the home screen wallpaper should be displayed, just odd that playing music fixes it...

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[TowersVault]

Have to tell you (irony!)--upgraded. It seems completely gone now. I never much cared, but the upgrade seems to have improved that minor issue.

Ah, I'll be waiting on another KitKat update for a different country then, I'll give it a few months then I'll boot to SuperNexus, these bugs are annoying.. Youtube is now causing my phone to heat up a lot as well.

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[Remaxmatt]

Yep, I gave it a go. This morning I discovered that you can fix it with the window animation scale in the Dev settings. The bug seems to be linked to timing of when the home screen wallpaper should be displayed, just odd that playing music fixes it...

Posted via Android Central App

Yeah you're right, that's odd, I wish I could come up with an explanation. But I find it odd too the range of issues different people are experiencing with the same phone, that some are saying it's all but destroyed the phone, some are having a few problems, and others have none.

?~best phone in the known Galaxy~?

 

[Kamran Hassan]

Updating my S4 to kitkat as i type this..hope all works well cause i already have issues with 4.3.. if its buggy, ill just flash it back to 4.3.

 

[monsieurms]

Ah, I'll be waiting on another KitKat update for a different country then, I'll give it a few months then I'll boot to SuperNexus, these bugs are annoying
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How big is your home screen wallpaper and lock screen in byte size? I always theorized that the reason for this was that I had rather larger wallpaper files for each that took up a fair bit of memory. Maybe I'm off base with the S4 and it doesn't matter one bit. The fact that it seems to have gone away tends to rebut my theory. HOWEVER, on my older, much slower phone it mattered a lot and caused a fair bit of delay reloading the home screen when I'd refresh it. Perhaps one thing to experiment with is compressing your wallpaper files more, and also resizing them down. There's just no need to have 2.3 meg file at 2048 x 1080, whatever, for a phone screen. Some of these cameras these days can take really large pix and they probably aren't necessary as such just for wallpaper on a 5.0 screen.

 

[TowersVault]

How big is your home screen wallpaper and lock screen in byte size? I always theorized that the reason for this was that I had rather larger wallpaper files for each that took up a fair bit of memory. Maybe I'm off base with the S4 and it doesn't matter one bit. The fact that it seems to have gone away tends to rebut my theory. HOWEVER, on my older, much slower phone it mattered a lot and caused a fair bit of delay reloading the home screen when I'd refresh it. Perhaps one thing to experiment with is compressing your wallpaper files more, and also resizing them down. There's just no need to have 2.3 meg file at 2048 x 1080, whatever, for a phone screen. Some of these cameras these days can take really large pix and they probably aren't necessary as such just for wallpaper on a 5.0 screen.

Lockscreen's full resolution is 1920x1080, file size is 29KB. Home screen is 1920x1080, file size is 400KB. It's not really big.

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[TowersVault]

Another bug, Youtube overheats my phone. It didn't cause this in the previous version (4.3). When I opened CPU-Z, my 1.6GHz cores (Exynos S4) were all running at 1GHz, prior to the 4.4.2 update, when I was still running 4.3, Youtube never used my 1.6GHz cores. All videos are still being loaded in the same quality. (The 1.6GHz cores idle at 250MHz, they idled when I watched Youtube videos.)

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[GetsugaTenshou]

Hey guys,

Has anyone faced a wifi problem since upgrading to 4.4.2? every time I try and turn on the wifi setting it goes very dim green, like it's turning on and then just goes back to being completely greyed out.

I have the exact same problem and I did a factory reset but the problem is still here. However, I did get a security policy update today in the morning and I did it and then tried turning the WiFi on again and it connected, but about 10 seconds later it disconnected and the problem was still there. It's getting really frustrating.

 

[anejek1]

Wow! OK clearly more than one person is having the same problem since this effedupdate. How long is it going to take to come up with a fix/patch? This is insane.

 

[JLTEEXO]

Hopefully soon

Videotron / S4 / SGH-M919V
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[vbomb2000]

I'm experiencing the lock screen issue where my phone doesn't want to wake up and allow me to input my password after a few hours of being turned on... seems to be a ram issue as the ram slowly creeps up to 1.5gb used and then freezing after lock screen and lag... I've tried a factory reset, battery pull, installing only a few key apps ie. Email for work, BBM... this is really disappointing as I really loved my phone while on 4.3, first Android phone after ditching blackberry... this is brutal.

Samsung S4 on Bell

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[TowersVault]

India's maintenance update made my i9500 a lot better. Split second home screen wallpaper flash is still there if I unlock my phone and have 2 different wallpapers. Hopefully all these pains will be fixed if Samsung really pushes for getting Android 4.4.3 to us when it's out.

Sent from my Exynos Powered S4.

 

[Sanjay Chandra]

India's maintenance update made my i9500 a lot better. Split second home screen wallpaper flash is still there if I unlock my phone and have 2 different wallpapers. Hopefully all these pains will be fixed if Samsung really pushes for getting Android 4.4.3 to us when it's out.

Sent from my Exynos Powered S4.

What's the build number ? Mine is NB3

 

[JLTEEXO]

I'm experiencing the lock screen issue where my phone doesn't want to wake up and allow me to input my password after a few hours of being turned on... seems to be a ram issue as the ram slowly creeps up to 1.5gb used and then freezing after lock screen and lag... I've tried a factory reset, battery pull, installing only a few key apps ie. Email for work, BBM... this is really disappointing as I really loved my phone while on 4.3, first Android phone after ditching blackberry... this is brutal.

Samsung S4 on Bell

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Same..

You should advise Bell though! They will leave a note on account and will report to Samsung about the issue. Also, they will able to tell you if you're still on warranty or not and maybe find a solution for you if anything worst happen. Well, that's what I did with Videotron so that they know that if my phone dies it's not my fault but the update fault. They couldn't give me any advice though because the update is new and they don't know much about all the issues yet.. but at least they left a note on my account. Plus they told me that 4 people have reported to them the same issue as us too since the update. More reports, more pressure on Samsung! or Google. I know it's not big help but anyways..

Btw if you do going to report, it's better to go straight at the Bell store

Videotron / S4 / SGH-M919V
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[Stephen Penfold]

My s4 will not switch mobile data on anymore, the SIM card is in and I can send/receive texts and make/receive calls but when I switch mobile data on I just get a message "insert SIM card to access network services" but to be fair this is the only flaw I have noticed although it is very annoying, any help?

 

[JLTEEXO]

Same issue with Rodgers. My phone usually goes around 7-8 hours before it finally freezes up. I've noticed it gets really warm the longer it stays on too even if I'm not using it

Yes! Exactly the same for me!

Videotron / S4 / SGH-M919V
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