Pimp My ROM Takes Android Tweaking To Newer Heights [Guide]

Are you into customizing your Android phone with all sorts of performance and usability enhancement tweaks to make your Android smartphone faster, smarter and better? If your answer is yes, you are going to love Pimp My ROM. Aimed to bring tons of useful tweaks to any stock of custom ROM on any Android device, Pimp My ROM takes it all one step further by using the excellent recovery-based AROMA Installer to let you easily choose and apply only the tweaks you need, from the list of all it is offering. Excited? Read on for more details, the list of tweaks it offers, download link and installation guide...

What Is Pimp My ROM

As we mentioned above, Pimp My ROM is a recovery-flashable AROMA script developed by XDA-Developers Senior Member Androguide.fr, that allows you to tweak countless aspects of your Android device in order to make it faster, more stable and more responsive. The tweaks include kernel tweaks, init.d scripts, build.prop tweaks, toggling several functionalities, multitasking tweaks, network and internet tweaks, GPS configuration files, and some extra feature from different popular ROMs.

 

Who Is Pimp My ROM For

Before we take a detailed look at Pimp My ROM and all that it offers, let us clarify one thing first: it is not meant for everyone! First of all, you will require a rooted Android device with a custom recovery such as ClockworkMod or TWRP installed. Secondly, it’s not something you simply flash from recovery and you’re done. Instead, you have to make choices in the flashing process, as it offers you literally dozens upon dozens of tweaks to select for optimizing several aspects of your device, and making the wrong choices can result in an undesirable experience or an instable device.

That said, it does offer adequate explanation on each option throughout the process that is enough for most intermediate level Android users to get a fair enough understanding of those options.

Included Tweaks

The list of tweaks offered by Pimp My ROM is quite impressive, to say the least. Let’s take a more detailed look at all the tweaks, features, enhancements and optimizations Pimp My ROM offers.

Kernel Tweaks

• CPU governor tweaks for Ondemand, OndemandX, Interactive, SmartassV2, Lulzactive and Conservative governors
• I/O scheduler tweaks
• Toggle VSync
• Disable different kernel sleepers
• Disable kernel error checking
• Tweak msgmin and msgmax values for your kernel

Init.D Tweaks

• Optimize touch screen responsiveness
• Internet speed tweaks
• Battery consumption tweaks
• CPU and GPU tuning tweaks
• Optimize sqlite3 databases
• Dalvik VM tweaks
• Defragment sqlite3 databases at each boot
• Move dalvik-cache to cache partition
• Bind-Mount dalvik-cache
• Use strict minimum free memory handlers
• Improve ext4 file system performance
• Force GPU 2D rendering
• Miscellaneous RAM tweaks
• Improve multitasking
• More SQLite tweaks
• CFS CPU scheduler tweaks
• General smoothness and responsiveness tweaks
• Internal SD card I/O tweaks
• External SD card I/O tweaks
• Zipalign APKs at each boot
• Thunderbolt system_tweak script

 

Build.Prop Tweaks

• 3G signal and speed tweaks
• Battery saving tweaks
• Camera quality tweaks
• Wi-Fi tweaks
• Dalvik RAM tweaks
• Deeper sleep
• Dialing time tweaks
• Increase JPG image quality
• Flash-LED tweaks
• Lock launcher in memory
• Internet speed tweaks
• Touchscreen tweaks
• Remove black screen after calling
• Allow purgeable assets
• Scrolling tweaks
• Video streaming tweaks
• Quick power on

Enable/Disable Functionalities

• Allow Dalvik VM to use JIT
• Enable video hardware acceleration
• Disable boot animation
• Enable GPU UI rendering
• Enable surface dithering
• Enable HSUPA
• Disable adb debugging icon
• Disable volume wake
• Disable sending of usage data
• Buttons backlight always on when screen is on
• Enable 16 bit transparency
• Disable/enable Android logger

 

Multitasking

• OOM Priorities (Low, mid, high or very high) for your multitasking preferences
• Minfree settings for your multitasking preferences
• ZRAM size (64MB or 128MB)
• Kernel sysctl tweaks
• Dalvik sysctl tweaks

Network & Internet

• Reinforce TCP/IP stack against SYN attacks
• Refuse redirects
• Refuse source-routing
• Network multitasking stability
• Avoid time-wait
• IPv4 protocol sysctl tweaks
• DNS and ppp0 interface tweaks

 

GPS Configuration

• Select gps.conf file for your country from 79 countries in the list for faster GPS satellite lock
• Select your continent for faster GPS satellite lock

Add Extra Features

• Add Open-VPN support
• Beats Audio
• Adrenaline Boost script
• Sony Walkman Suite
• Block ads

That’s quite a handful for one tweaking script, isn’t it? The best thing is that you don’t have to know about all of these things in order to use it. Simply skip anything you aren’t sure of and go ahead with the rest, and you won’t have to worry about messing something up because of having no idea about it.

Requirements

What truly shines about Pimp My ROM is that unlike most such tweakers, it isn’t targeted at any single device or a limited set of devices. Instead, it’s targeted at all Android devices out there, regardless of whether they are running a stock version of the operating system, a manufacturer or carrier specific variant like HTC Sense, Samsung TouchWiz or MotoBlur, or even a custom ROM such as AOKP, CyanogenMod, MIUI, Paranoid Android or any other for that matter. When it comes to the version of Android, Pimp My ROM supports all versions of Android 2.3 and later, including Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

Do note that your device must be rooted and have an unlocked bootloader for full read/write access to the internal memory, in order to let Pimp My ROM apply all these tweaks. You can find instructions for unlocking the bootloader and rooting your device at our guide. You will also need a custom recovery for the purpose. The most widely used option is ClockworkMod, but you can use any custom recovery of your choice such as the excellent TWRP.

Installation

Ready to run Pimp My ROM on your phone to tweak it to the max? Let’s go ahead with it!

 

1. Simply grab the latest version for your device from the Pimp My ROM forum thread at XDA-Developers (you’ll have to scroll down to the ‘Downloads’ section in the first post there). Not sure whether your device is XHDPI, HDPI, MDPI or LDPI? Check out this list of Android devices with their screen resolutions.
2. Once you have downloaded Pimp My ROM, transfer it to your device’s SD card, reboot it into recovery.
3. Before you proceed further, perform a backup from the ‘backup and restore’ section of recovery, to be on the safe side.
4. Now choose to ‘install zip from sd card’ and flash the zip file that you downloaded in step 1.
5. You will be greeted with the excellent AROMA installer interface that will guide you through the process of choosing all the tweaks that you want.
6. After agreeing with the terms of use, you will be asked whether you are running a stock-based ROM or an AOSP-based one, along with the version of Android you’re on. If you are using a rooted version of the official ROM for your device (Sense, MotoBlur or TouchWiz based) or a custom ROM based on these, select Stock-Based ROM. If your device is running pure Android or a custom ROM based on pure Android (CyanogenMod, AOKP, Paranoid Android etc.), select the appropriate Android version from the AOSP-based ROM list.
7. Proceed to select from all the tweaks that will be listed in the next screens. Every tweak will have its description shown with it to help you choose.
8. Once you have made your selection through all the options, the chosen tweaks will be applied together in the end.
9. Wipe cache, followed by dalvik cache. (There is no need to wipe data).
10. Reboot the device, and you’re done!

The first boot might take a while as the new scripts run for the first time. It’ll be a good idea to give it a few minutes after it has fully booted, and then reboot it once more. You will now start feeling a noticeable difference in speed and performance based on the tweaks you have selected.

Pimp My ROM is under active development and is being steadily improved, with newer tweaks being added in each new release. Also, some tweaks not considered feasible enough are removed in the updates as well. All-in-all, it is the best Android tweaker we have come across, and the improvement in performance it brings is fairly noticeable. Every serious Android enthusiast should give it a shot.