The Samsung Galaxy S3 is getting on a bit now in terms of technology and of course official updates have been stopped by Samsung. This means that officially the handset isn’t going to get updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop. But the good news is that the XDA Developers have offered the update to owners of the handset.
The older members of the XDA Developers are behind the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Samsung Galaxy S3 GT-i9300 and providing you own a handset that is unlocked there is nothing stopping you from updating to it. As this is in the alpha stages though there are some issues with it at the moment. The colour calibration isn’t working, nor is the GPS, graphics and the device doesn’t sleep. This means that it isn’t a ROM that you are going to want to use on a handset that you rely on daily. You could try it out though and if you want to install it you will need 50% battery at least and then go through the steps below.
• Download the arter97 kernel file and arter97’s Android 5.0 Lollipop update firmware from the source link below this tutorial.
• Extract the Lollipop ROM ZIP file and put the ROM back-up in the following location – /sdcard/clockwordmod/backup on your Samsung Galaxy S3. Also transfer the kernel zip file to your SD card.
• Enter recovery mode on your device and perform a full wipe of the system, cache, dalvik cache, and data.
• Restore back-up. This will actually install the Android Lollipop ROM to your device, as you have stored the 5.0 firmware in the backup folder on your device.
You will then have to install the arter97 kernel, don’t restart the device as the ROM will not boot without it. Remain in recovery mode to complete the installation.
• Choose the kernel ZIP file that you transferred to the SD card on your device in recovery and flash it.
• Reboot your device. The ROM installation process is now complete.
The arter97 kernel is supported by various Galaxy S3 variants like the Galaxy S3 SK-3G (SHW-M440S), SK-LTE (SHV-E210S), KT-LTE (SHV-E210K), and the LG-LTE (SHV-E210L). So you could follow the above procedure to install the Galaxy S3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update ROM on these variants as well. The only major variant that isn’t supported yet is the International LTE model of the Galaxy S3 (GT-I9305). The kernel comes with some great features like the latest Linux base, speed improvements, battery improvements, CPU overclocking as well as undervolting capability, dual-boot functionality, new CPU & I/O governors, and others.
By now your Samsung Galaxy S3 should be running the alpha version of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
