Enhancing the system performance

Lots of the custom ROMs that you can find on the Net bring performance enhancements, extended battery life, and lots of small tweaks. Most of these enhancements can be achieved with a surgical tuning of the build.prop file.

Customizing the system property file

The Android build.prop file contains details about a variety of system settings that are applied to the system during the boot sequence. Before diving into its customization, we need an overview about its internal structure.

Open a terminal and connect to your device using the following command:

:$ adb shell

Navigate to the /system folder and open the build.prop file. The content will look like the following snippet:

ro.product.model=Nexus 6
ro.product.brand=google
ro.product.name=shamu
ro.product.device=shamu
ro.product.board=shamu
[…]

As you can guess, parts of these instructions are specific for every device, but a few of them are quite common. We surely have device model name, brand, codename for product...