Source-Built Lollipop for Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy S III Mini

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Just yesterday, we talked about some early bird builds of Lollipop for several devices. Those builds all have one thing in common: They were made for devices with working AOSP device trees that have been provided by their manufacturers. This time, we want to showcase one of the first AOSP Lollipop ROMs for quite an old device, the Samsung Galaxy S III Mini.

Ironically, the S3 Mini’s bigger brother (which uses a different SoC) hasn’t received an official version of KitKat due to RAM limitations. XDA Senior Members New Macław and marcin1147 proved that Lollipop can work on the aforementioned Samsung phone. At the current stage of development, the S3 Mini Lollipop build can’t be considered a daily driver. There are some broken things like RIL, audio, and of course, the camera. Hopefully they will be fixed in the timely fashion, and all Samsung Galaxy S III Mini users will have a chance to use this ROM and prove to Samsung that even older devices can run the newest builds flawlessly. Head over to the S3 Mini Lollipop development thread to learn more.

Of course, the Samsung Galaxy S III Mini isn’t the only device that received a working Android 5.0 build. XDA Senior Member MWisBest created two builds for “The Forgotten” Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The ROM is at a beta stage, and there are plenty of things that don’t work correctly. It uses the updated GPU drivers by XDA Senior Member Ziyan that we featured a while back. If you own a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, you can grab a version for maguro or toro by visiting the relevant threads.