Samsung A04 Custom Rom -

The Samsung Galaxy A04 is a popular budget device known for its decent battery life and simple design. However, like many entry-level phones, it often suffers from performance sluggishness, bloatware, and a heavy user interface (One UI Core).

If you feel your A04 is lagging or you’re bored with the stock look, installing a Custom ROM is the best way to breathe new life into the device. In this post, we cover everything you need to know about the custom ROM scene for the Samsung Galaxy A04.

Some developers take newer versions of OneUI (e.g., OneUI 5.1 or 6.0) from similar devices (like the A04s or A13) and port them to the A04.

The Galaxy A04 sat in its drawer like a quiet ghost. It wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t alive.

Mira had bought it two years ago as a backup phone. Plastic body. 6.5-inch LCD. The MediaTek Helio P35 chipset that had never been fast, now felt like cold honey in winter. OneUI Core 4.1 was polite but heavy. Every swipe had a micro-stutter. Every app opened with a sigh.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she whispered, after the camera took four seconds to launch.

Her main phone was a flagship. But this A04—this little trooper—had her second SIM, her music, her offline maps. She wanted it to feel light.

That’s when she found the forum.

A thread with only 14 replies. No fancy graphics. Just a title: [GSI] AOSP 13 for A04 (SM-A045F). The original poster had a strange username: Helio_Hacker.

Most people had given up on the A04. No official LineageOS. No TWRP thread with pretty screenshots. Just scattered posts about Project Treble and “GSI” — Generic System Images.

“The A04 has Treble support,” the post read. “But you must unlock the bootloader first. And Samsung doesn’t like that.” samsung a04 custom rom

Mira had never done this before.

That night, with a cup of tea gone cold, she enabled Developer Options. Tapped “OEM Unlocking” seven times until it blinked. Powered off. Held Vol Up + Vol Down while plugging the USB into her laptop.

Warning: Custom OS can cause critical problems.

She pressed Vol Up to continue. The screen went black. Then a green Android logo lying on its back, chest open. Download Mode.

The first hurdle: VBMETA. Samsung’s Verified Boot meant she had to flash a custom vbmeta_disabled.tar via Odin. Her hands shook. One wrong click, and the A04 would become a shiny black brick.

But Odin passed. Blue box. “PASS!”

Then the hardest part: booting into a custom recovery. No official TWRP for the A04. Only a patched recovery.img from a Russian forum. She flashed it using heimdall on her Linux laptop.

The screen flickered. For five seconds, nothing. Then—orange text. TWRP 3.7.0.

She almost cried.

From there, she wiped everything. System. Data. Dalvik. The A04 was now a blank slate, neither Samsung nor Google. Just raw metal and silicon waiting for a soul. The Samsung Galaxy A04 is a popular budget

She downloaded lineage-20.0-20250211-UNOFFICIAL-treble_arm64_bvS.img.xz. A pure Android 13 GSI without GApps.

Using fastboot, she flashed it to the system partition.

fastboot flash system lineage-20.0.img
fastboot -w
fastboot reboot

The A04 rebooted.

The Samsung logo appeared—then vanished faster than usual. A new animation. Simple. Gray circles spinning. Then:

“Welcome.”

Setup took 30 seconds. No Samsung account. No Bixby. No Theme Store. Just Android. Pure, naked, beautiful Android.

Mira swiped up.

The app drawer opened instantly.

She opened the camera. Snap. 0.5 seconds.

She opened Chrome. Two seconds flat.

The A04 felt like a different phone. The Helio P35 was never slow—it was just suffocating under Samsung’s skin. Now it breathed.

Over the next week, Mira installed F-Droid. Added NewPipe for YouTube without ads. Installed K-9 Mail. No Google Play Services meant the battery lasted two days. The 5,000 mAh battery, once drained by background processes, now felt endless.

The only downside? No VoLTE. And NFC didn’t work (but the A04 never had it anyway). Banking apps complained, so she used the web versions.

She named the ROM “HelioWing.”

On the forum, she posted her results. The 14 replies grew to 87. Someone fixed the brightness slider bug. Another person compiled a minimal kernel with lower latency.

Six months later, a teenager in Brazil messaged her: “Your guide saved my A04. My family couldn’t buy a new phone. Thank you.”

Mira smiled at her drawer phone—still plastic, still humble, but no longer a ghost. The Samsung A04 had become something Samsung never intended: truly, freely hers.

And sometimes, that’s the whole point of custom ROMs. Not specs. Not benchmarks. Just the right to decide what runs on the glass and metal you paid for.

The Unisoc chipset is the main bottleneck. Unlike Snapdragon, Unisoc releases kernel source code late or incompletely. However, the community is actively working on:

If more developers join, the A04 could see stable Android 15 before Samsung drops support. Some developers take newer versions of OneUI (e

Prepare the following tools and files: