How to install Android Go on any smartphone?

Google announced Android Oreo 8.1 Go Edition for enabling the smartphones with low-end hardware to run the latest version of Android without any hiccups. Many companies have used this feature by Google to sell low-end smartphones. However, the Android Oreo 8.1 Go Edition is not a completely different smartphone. It is an optimized version of the already existing Android Oreo. Also, what's interesting is that it automatically enables those optimizations based on the RAM the device has. In this article, we are gonna show you how to give your old smartphone a new life with a Low-RAM Property Patcher mod. Please note that this method requires a custom recovery.

Disclaimer: BeetelBite is not responsible for bricked devices, dead SD cards or any kind of damage made to your smartphone. You are choosing to make these modifications and any result, positive or negative, you will be responsible.

What is Low-RAM Property Patcher mod?

Low-RAM Property Patcher mod is developed for users to enable or disable Android Go optimizations on the current Android Oreo 8.1 ROM on any device without any need of rebuilding it. It enables all the optimizations that have introduced on the Android Go project by Google. You just need to flash the enabler file using a custom recovery like TWRP.

The XDA senior member AdrianDC developed this mod. It will work only if the ROM developers validate the low ram UI changes. Heavily modded ROM's like MIUI might now have it. However, we tested it out on multiple devices running Lineage OS and it worked fine.

It will bring in various optimizations. Some of them are:

• Flat recent/multitasking UI
• high-end graphics disabled
• multi-windows disabled
• less recent apps cache
• minor notification icons changes
• no apps notifications access/zen access / VR listeners/picture in picture (PIP) accesses
• less logger buffer sizes (devs)

How to enable Android Go optimizations?

1. Download Low-RAM Property Patcher (Enabler and Disabler) flashable zips from here.
2. Move the zips in your smartphone and remember its path.
3. Enter your device's recovery mode. You can do this by either Switching off your device and by pressing power, volume up and down button at the same time. This can also be done by a simple command on the ADB "adb reboot recovery".

4. Click the install button on the TWRP recovery or if you are using any other custom recovery, select the install package option in that. If you don't have the TWRPrecovery or any other custom recovery installed, make sure to install that and then continue from steps here.
5. After that navigate to where you kept the enabled zip and select it.

6. Flash the zip file and then wipe Cache/Dalvik Cache and reboot.

The steps to disabling the Low RAM optimizations are the same, except you need to flash the disabler file instead of enabler file.

Edit: After playing a little while with the Android Go, we figured out that rooted users can enable Android Go optimizations without flashing any file. They just need to add a line in their system/build.prop file. You need root to edit that file.

Just 'ro.config.low_ram=true' line in your system/build.prop file and reboot the device.