You’d be surprised to see that the Samsung Galaxy S3 gets the Android 5.0 Lollipop ROM the device’s big brother Galaxy S3 does, but it’s a good news anyway. Gotta give a thumbs up to the NovaFusion team for building a Galaxy S3 mini Android 5.0 ROM this quick.

The Android Open Source Project 5.0 by NovaFusion has released a very early build of Android 5.0 Lollipop for the Galaxy S3 mini. As you’d expect, there isn’t much working on the ROM, except that it’s booting and you can get the Android 5.0 experience on the device.

The Galaxy S3 mini is never going to see the Android 5.0 Lollipop update officially from Samsung, so your hopes are all on the AOSP based ROMs like CM, PA and other similar ROMs. And until the big league custom ROM developers release an AOSP based Android 5.0 ROM for your Galaxy S3 mini, you can get a taste of the Android 5.0 goodness on your S3 mini with this AOSP 5.0 ROM.

All thanks to the NovaFusion team for beginning work on an AOSP based Android 5.0 ROM for the Galaxy S3 mini. The ROM is a work in progress at this time so we wouldn’t recommend you to install this if you use your device as a daily driver. Below is the list of things that aren’t working:

NOT WORKING (as of November 6, 2014):

  • RIL (phone/SMS/3G) doesn’t work [WIP]
  • audio (both speakers/headphones/microphone) doesn’t work at all
  • GPS/Glonass doesn’t work
  • this release doesn’t support f2fs yet, only ext4 filesystem – remember to wipe data/cache partitions as ext4 before flashing this ROM!
  • camera doesn’t work at all
  • missing part of OMXes implementation (so there’s no fully HW video acceleration)

The NovaFusion team should be able to fix the RIL (phone) soon, along with Camera and Audio. In case some issues remain, then your only hope would be CyanogenMod’s release of Android 5.0 based ROM, which they should be calling CM 12.

Anyway, let’s hit the downloads section and see how to install Android 5.0 on your Galaxy S3 mini.

DOWNLOADS

 icon-download Download Lollipop 5.0 AOSP ROM (164 MB)
File name: aosp5.0_golden.nova.20141106.zip

└ All credits for the ROM file goes to NovaFusion team.

  Download Gapps for Android 5.0 Lollipop (90.7 MB)
File name: gapps-lp-20141105-signed.zip

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

WARNING: Warranty may be void of your device if you follow the procedures given on this page. You only are responsible for your device. We won’t be liable if any damage occurs to your device and/or its components.

Important Note: Backup important files stored on your Galaxy S3 mini before proceeding with the steps below, we’ll be wiping the data and cache partitions as ext4 before flashing the ROM and that could wipe the internal SD card on your device. So make sure to take a backup of important files like photos, music, videos, document, etc.

  1. Make sure your device is Galaxy S3 mini GT-I8190, do NOT try to install this ROM on any other device.
  2. Install a custom recovery (TWRP) on your Galaxy s3 mini.
  3. Transfer/save the two zip files you downloaded above to your Galaxy S3 mini.
  4. Boot into Recovery mode:
    • Turn off your Galaxy S3 mini and wait until it’s completely switched off.
    • Press and hold “Volume Up + Home + Power”  and release them as soon as you until the boot logo screen.
  5. Once in recovery mode, select Wipe » select Advanced Wipe » select/cross the box for Data and Cache and then touch the “Repair or Change File System” button to wipe as ext4. Once done, do “Swipe to wipe” on the bottom of the screen.
  6. Once wipe data/cache as ext4 finishes, go back to the main menu of TWRP recovery and select Install.
  7. Navigate to the file where you saved aosp_mako-ota-eng.5.0.zip file, select it and then “Swipe to Confirm Flash” on the bottom of the screen. Now wait until the flashing process finishes.
  8. Now similarly flash the gapps-lp-20141105-signed.zip file like you flashed the Android 5.0 ROM file above.
  9. After flashing both the files. Go to Main menu, select Wipe » and then “Swipe to Factory Reset” on the bottom of the screen.
  10. Now reboot your phone. Go back to the main menu again, select Reboot » select System.

That’s all. Your Galaxy S3 mini will now boot with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Be extremely excited for this.