6 Things You Need to do Before Installing 3rd-party Custom ROMs?

There are many ways you can do to improve the performance and battery life of your tablet. You can download a RAM cleaning app or you can also remove some apps that keep draining the battery life out of your device.

But in my opinion, I think one of the best ways to improve your device in performance and battery life is by installing stock Android custom ROMs.

I actually managed to solve the problems of performance and battery life of my current smartphone, Alcatel Flash 2 - which is by installing the 3rd party custom ROM. And now my smartphone performs much smoother and its battery life has also improved a lot thanks to this much lighter stock custom ROM.

However, in installing custom ROM, any custom ROMs, I think there are many important things to prepare. There are many things that must be done first before you start the process of installing custom ROM on your device.

Below I’m explain to you 6 things that you must prepare before installing any custom ROMs on your tablet or smartphone.


Okay, before proceeding to the process of installing custom ROM, the first important thing to do is backup all of your important data, such as: videos, photos, mp3s or documents on your tablet or smartphone.

You can actually backup all of your important files on your computer. So once your device is installed with the new system, then you can put all of your media files back into your microSD card.

But of course, before moving your files back to microSD card, you need to start fresh with your micoSD card by formatting it right in the new OS.


Besides media files, the other important thing to backup is your apps and games.

I personally use ‘Titanium Backup’ to backup my important apps like Firefox, Opera and other web browsers along with their saved data, like bookmarks, history, bookmark layout and saved pages.

And once my device is successfully installed with the new custom ROM, I can re-install all of these apps back again into the new system, along with their saved data of course. So all the bookmarks, history and saved pages will be restored back into the apps.

With ‘Titanium Backup’, of course you can also backup your Android games. But I strongly recommend you to backup the games that are SMALL in size, not the big ones. So it won’t take up a lot of space on your storage.

*** Meanwhile, if you want to backup heavy games that are huge in terms of size (like around 1GB – 3GB), you can check out this page to learn more about that.


Before even proceeding to the process of installing custom ROM (through recovery mode), you need to make sure that your device currently has around 50% of battery life.

This is really important to do because in the installation process of the new custom ROM, it will drain a lot of battery life out of your device. And if your device is dead during the process and the process also fails, then you won’t be able to recharge your device again. Ever.


In the process of installing the new custom ROM, it’s always important to create the existing backup system of your device. So if anything wrong happens in this process, you can still restore your device and use it normally again just like before.

However, creating the backup system of your device requires a sufficient amount of storage around 2 – 4GB (depends on the amount of apps and games that have been installed). So if your device has limited amount of storage, then there will be no space anymore for the backup system.

This is why I strongly recommend you to move all of your media files to your computer in order to give more space for the backup system.


As I mentioned above, before even installing any 3rd party custom ROMs like CyanogenMOD, it’s really vital to create the existing backup system/OS of your device. So if anything wrong happens (like ‘bootloop’, etc), you can still restore the old system/OS back to normal again.

This is why you’re gonna need a custom recovery tool like TWRP or CWM (ClockWorkMod) in order to create this backup system/OS of your device.

I actually already wrote the post that covered this topic. So if you want to learn more about these custom recovery tools, you can check out my older posts below.

• How to create the backup system using TWRP?
• How to restore the backup system with TWRP?

Before starting the installation process of any 3rd party custom ROMs (like CyanogenMOD, etc), your tablet or smartphone needs to start fresh with the system. So all the changes that have been done inside the system will be reset back to factory setting.

In order to do that, you will need a custom recovery tool like CWM or TWRP because any of these tools come with the feature to 'wipe all the data' inside the system with factory reset.


Well, there you go guys, 6 things that you always need to remember before even starting the process of installing 3rd party custom ROMs. Hopefully, what I’ve shared in this post will be helpful and informative to you.

I believe all the things aforementioned above should always be the basic rules you need to implement everytime you want to do the installation of any custom ROMs on your tablet.

Have any question? Leave your comment here!