However, since then Verizon has made further changes to their plans, which make it where if you purchase an upgrade phone at the discounted prices, you are forced to change your data plan. For many, the tiered data plans might not hurt, but thanks to services such as Netflix and Flixster, I use between 50-150GB a month. This makes the tiered plans outrageously expensive.
So I had the issue of having a 2+ year old Android smartphone that has the latest update from Motorola and Verizon taking it up to JellyBean (Android 4.1.2). I have the Google Nexus 7 tablet (2013 edition) that runs KitKat (Android 4.4.3), so I have seen and like the improvements to the system.
The other factor to consider other than the software was that the Droid 4 appears to be the final slider-phone from Motorola. I have never liked the onscreen keyboard on the phones with either them taking up the majority of the screen in landscape mode, or the "keys" being small in portrait mode.
So I basically had three choices: continue with an old version of Android; spend hundreds of dollars and buy (at full price) a new phone with KitKat; or install a custom ROM and get KitKat installed on my current phone. I
decided to take a chance, risking "bricking" my phone, and installed a custom ROM. So the first step was to see what ROM options were available.
To start with, checking out sites like http://www.redmondpie.com/best-most-popular-custom-roms-for-android-and-why-you-should-try-them-out/ help. Seeing that CyanogenMod appears to be one of the most popular, I dug deeper looking into them and verified that they had ROM options not only for my Droid 4, but also my Droid 3 and an old Samsung Captiva (AT&T Galaxy S). I'm not sure how thorough the other ROM developers are out there, but CyanogenMod impresses me with their website/wiki - http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Main_Page.
For all three of the above mentioned phones, they have well written instructions for installing the custom ROM. The only issue I had when I performed the mod on the Samsung was that their instructions did not mention anything about rooting the phone first, so I had to use Google to find other instructions, but after spending most of the day, I got the CyanogenMod ROM installed on the Captiva. I decided to skip the upgrade to the Droid 3 and go straight to the Droid 4, which was the one I really wanted to mod anyway.
The Droid 4 originally came with Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and for a while before Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) became available for it, I ran an ICS Launcher to get the basic look/feel. But as I mentioned above, Motorola stopped the upgrades to the phone with JellyBean (4.1). As many know, there were many flavors of JellyBean: 4.1.x, 4.2.x, 4.3.x were all called JellyBean. The name did not change until 4.4 - KitKat.
The custom ROM options presented on the CyanogenMod site are almost bewildering as they have multiple categories: Stable; Release Candidate; Snapshot; Milestone; Nightly; Experiments. As one might guess, Stable would be the official, tested and approved release and the risk increases the further down the category list you go. The most recent stable release for the Droid 4 (code named Maserati) is 10.2.1 from February 2014, which is JellyBean. The Release Candidates are all from 2013. Snapshots appear to be released monthly.
So, being cautious, I first upgraded to 10.2.1, the stable well tested release. With the thoroughness of their walk-thru (http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_maserati) I was able to get my Droid 4 upgraded in less than two hours. I did this on a Saturday. On Sunday, I replaced the stable 10.2.1 with the July monthly snapshot of 11, thus installing KitKat on my phone. What I've lost in the process is all the Verizon and Motorola apps, the built-in car dock app, hotspot management (MAC filtering and device connection limits). However, the dock app was easily replaced with the Car Home Ultra, which has more features available than the stock app did. I have gained a slight performance increase, but overall, I feel as if I gained more life into the phone, postponing the need for a new one.
