Saturday 24 October 2015

Lenovo S650 update to VibeUI 2.0 1439

This post is a follow up on my older posts on Lenovo VibeUI KitKat ROM. I settled with version VibeUI 1.5 (1427) for about a year, in spite of hte following issues:

  1. Waze always had a dark overlay on the map during navigation with eventual flickering, to the extent that is was completely unusable for navigation as the map was hardly visible. I am not aware of any workaround for this issue, other than using alternative navigation software.
  2. Google Maps navigation is always crashing after a few minutes. The issue was narrowed down to affect newer versions, and downgrading to 8.0.0 proved to be a stable temporal workaround.
  3. Security - in more particular, the lack of regular security updates and recently disclosed android related vulnerabilities frightened me at this stage.

Lenovo published a firmware update for S650 smartphones on the 25th of September last year, but at I did not see a compelling reason to install it right away, I was rather waiting for subsequent updates but they did not come. I decided to upgrade and yesterday night I found time for it.

The upgrade procedure

I cleaned up both internal and external storage, and made sure the following files are present to the external storage:

  • VIBEUI_V2.0_1439_7.3.1_ST_S650_WC52.zip from vibeui.com
  • 5-31_GApps_Minimal_4.4.2_signed.zip which I already had from my last download
  • superuser.zip - com.koushikdutta.superuser which I also already downloaded earlier.

I took a backup of my call logs and text messages, copied important data to my computer, then booted into recovery and created a full TWRP backup. Read my previous posts for details on this step.

After wiping data, cache and dalvik cache partitions I installed the update from within TWRP recovery, then immediately applied superuser.zip. Before reboot, I opened a terminal from within TWRP, and manually mounted the system partition and deleted Chinese apps that I do not need:


mkdir /tmp/s
mount -t ext4 /dev/block/mmcblk0p5 /tmp/s
# change directory to /tmp/s/vendor/operator/app/ via TWRP menu as the built in terminal 
# does not allow you to do that
mv Len* .. # move LenovoPhonemgr.apk which I decided to keep this time
rm *.apk 
mv ../Len* . # move back the app
# change to /tmp/s/priv-app/ via TWRP
rm GameWorld_Phone.apk Youyue.apk
# change to /
umount /tmp/s

Once this was done, but before installing the google apps package, I rebooted the phone, and chose English language in the setup wizard. This was a bit tricky due to the many pop-ups, but still much easier without the Google setup wizard, which would have been run in Chinese had I installed Google Apps in one shot. After language selection and initial setup, I went back to recovery and installed google apps minimal. After booting the system the google setup wizard was greeting me in English...

Later I restored my call logs and text messages as well as application data of some of my key apps. This I had to do manually via and adb shell as Super Backup failed to restore application data even with root privileges granted. My approach was to do some setup of the critical apps manually, so the data files are were created by the app itself with appropriate permissions and ownership, then I overwrote the content of the necessary files with cat $BACKUP > $DATAFILE.

First impressions

Both Google Maps and Waze works fine with this app. I got used to the previous ROM and found stock theme and UI changes annoying. I quickly tailored the theme and launcher according to my preferences.

The Goolge Apps minimal package was outdated, which gave me some application crashed before and during updated, but once the new version of Google packages were installed, everything worked fine.

Unfortunately, according to Stagefright Detector the new version is even a bit more vulnerable than the previous one.

Stagefright

As mentioned above, this new ROM contains one more Statefright related vulnerability compared to VibeUI 1.5, and Lenovo does offer security patches, but not for this phone.

As a countermeasure, I disabled automatic retrieval of multimedia message, from the mail messaging app as recommended here and revoked MMS permissions from any other application. Of course I would be happier if Lenovo provided security updates regularly and more consistently across reasonably new mobile devices.

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