I have been closely watching the progress of Android 4.3 or Cyanogenmod (CM) 10.2 development progress. There were some hiccups, but the quality of the ROM increased by leaps and bounds. At the same time my email flow is increasing. I know that sooner or later I will need to put the corporate mail on the phone. The problem is that the security policy requires device encryption. From the posts of some users, encryption did not survive the upgrade process from 10.1 to 10.2.
The internal SD card seems to the issue. An encrypted internal SD card in CM10.1 when upgraded to CM10.2, the storage will never be accessible again. A full wipe and restore is required. Not exactly a fun thing to do in the middle of an upgrade.
So what I have decided to do is to upgrade before doing the encryption.
After a weekend of use, I have found that Android 4.3 is usable, there some weird self-restart. In the past, CM10 and CM10.1 I have found that when an app crashed so horribly that a self or force reboot is required, it only happens once per app. So far CM10.2 has not breached that baseline, well at least for the 11 Sep nightly.
I have upgraded to the 17 Sep nightly. I was watching a 30 minute Youtube video and it crashed 3 times. I am not even halfway through the video. I have decided rarely used apps, to reclaim some free space. When I uninstalled the LTA app, MyTransportSG, the period between self-restart increases. Hmmm I installed back the app, played the video and it works fine for the rest of the afternoon. On the way back from work, it died again. I think I will take it out permanently and monitor some more.
This blog was written using MS Word 2010. Nice eh?
Update 21 Sep 13
I am now on 17 Sep nightly. The phone is . still not good enough as a daily driver. Prolong use of network sometimes cause the phone to restart. Strangely the Up Time counter was not reset. Some kind of soft-restart or the launcher did. This morning I had encountered the infamous Android freeze. I might go ahead a few more nightlies to see if things improve, otherwise is back to 4.2.2 RC2 With turbulent times ahead for Cyanogenmod team, the end is drawing close for this phone.
Update 25 Apr 14
Android 4.3 or CM 10.2 has a memory bug that causes the kernel to run out of memory and crash. This happens approximately after 2 days of use. I have tried Gustavo, Apolo and Dorimanx to no success. In the end I upgraded to Android 4.4.2 or CM11