How to Flash a Rom to Android Phone

Situation like that may freak you out: when you found tons of cool and fun apps in Google Store and desire to download some on your Samsung Galaxy S5, Sony Xperia ZL, HTC One M9 or other popular Android phone, you are told that some of those apps are not available for your Android phone, because of being blocked by manufactures or carriers. Or you are fed up with the pre-installed apps which occupy too much your phone memory. Don't be frustrated. To tackle this issue, you can flash a custom ROM and root your Android device to get complete mercy of your phone.

What is ROM?
ROM in Android device is essentially the style, theme and organization of the operating system, similar to Windows or Mac operating system, helping you add new functionality to your Android device, even if the manufacturer or carrier has not yet released it for your device.

Read up here, you may wonder how to flash your Android phone so as to take greater advantage of it. But I must warn you that flashing an Android ROM is not a newbie procedure. The worst result is that you may end up bricking your phone if some terrible mistakes happen during the process. Yet it doesn't occur all the time. Just keep reading and follow the step-by-step guide below.

Step 1 Unlock the Bootloader and Flash a Custom Recovery
Owing to the ways of unlocking bootloader for each Android phone are different, we feel sorry that we can't go through the detailed steps on it here. You can search for instructions on Google or download and try recovery (usually TWRP or ClockworkMod) to flash it.

Note: Unlocking bootloader and flash a custom recovery will most likely wipe your phone. So highly recommend you to transfer anything you want to keep to your computer beforehand. You can refer to this article and learn how to backup Android phone to computer.

Step 2 Make a Backup of All the Data Stored on Android Phone
To back up the existing data on your device, you can get into the Recovery Mode. If something goes wrong, you can retrieve all the precious pictures, contacts, apps, etc. before rooting it. Follow the steps below to do your backups.
1.Firstly, get your Android power off. Pressing the Power and Volume Up buttons at the same time, and you will enter the Recovery Mode.
2.Use the Volume buttons up and down to select items in the Recovery Mode. Then, head to the "Backup" section and hit the "Power" button to confirm it.
The backup process will take a while, just be patient and wait for its end.

Step 3 Download and Flash the ROM You Need
There are numerous custom ROMs out there available for Android devices. First of all, you need to search for a ROM zip file suits your Android model on Google. Here are 6 most popular custom ROMs you can consider, CyanogenMod, MIUI, Paranoid, AOKP, Slim ICS, Liquid Smooth. Once you found the appropriate ROM zip file, download it to your computer, transfer and save it to your Android phone SD card via USB cable.

Note: Remember where you've saved the ROM zip file in.

1.Reboot Android phone into Recovery Mode as being introduced in Step 2.
2.Head to "Install Zip from SD Card" option, select the zip file you just downloaded and click "OK" to start installation.
3.Wait for the process to finish.
4.When the set up finished, navigate to wipe data/ factory reset, or wipe cache partition so as to avoid problems caused by previous data.
5.If you backed apps, settings and more with Titanium, don't remember to restore them.

Note: Steps on flashing a ROM for Android are almost similar as those illustrated above, but there are still some steps differ among various phone models. Sorry for not being able to introduce one by one in this article.

Now you've got your Android device with brand new system. Feel free to download whatever apps you want, upgrade the OS system to the latest version etc. Just to be the real master of your Android phone.