How to use custom boot animations on Samsung Galaxy S4 mini

Ever stumbled upon a cool boot animation on your friend's device or on the internet? If you are also bored of your stock SAMSUNG logo boot animation and want to use something different, this guide will show you how.


It's actually very easy and it only takes less than three minutes to achieve this. You basically need to pick a boot animation that you like from the web (they are posted everywhere; blogs, forums, etc). After you have chosen your desired boot animation, you first need to enable it to work on your Galaxy S4 mini.

Enabling custom boot animations on Galaxy S4 mini:

In order to get your custom boot animation to appear upon booting, you do not only need to paste a file to your system partition to get it to work. You first need to enable it. For this, you basically need to flash a zip file that will replace your default bootanimation file that is inside your system partition with a modified one that is instructed to load the animation from another file.

Download Boot Animation Enabler - Click here.
This enabler zip file has been created by anbech from xda-developers forums.

Now once you have downloaded the enabler zip file to your sdcard, follow the below instructions:

1. Boot into CWM Recovery
2. Go to install zip
3. Then select choose zip from external sdcard
4. Now locate the enabler zip file and choose it
5. Choose Yes when asked
6. After flashing is complete, press the back button to go the main menu and select reboot system now

That is all. You may notice that on upon rebooting, you no longer have the SAMSUNG logo boot animation but a different animation that says android.

Installing your desired custom boot animation:

Now that you have enabled custom boot animations, it is time to use your new one. As already mentioned above, you can find some neat boot animations on various blogs and forums. It is recommended that you look for qHD (540x960) ones for the best results. The boot animations are always packed inside a file called bootanimation.zip file. This file contains all of the animations' frames into images and also contains one small configuration file on how it should work.

One boot animation that you could try out is the Android KitKat by PIKO1982 from xda-developers forums. You can find it in this post.

After you have downloaded your desired bootanimation.zip to your sdcard, follow the below steps:

1. Open up a root browsing tool such as Root Explorer, ES File Explorer and head into your sdcard partition.
2. Select and choose to copy/move the bootanimation.zip file.
3. Copy/Move the bootanimation.zip file to the directory /system/app/ (if it says the partition is read-only, mount it R/W)
4. After you have pasted the file, you now need to change its permissions. The location of this option varies by the tool you are using.
5. Set the permissions to rw-r--r-- (also known as 644)

Here is an image demonstrating on which boxes need to be check and which ones need to be unchecked:

Once you have performed all of the above steps correctly, it is finally time to reboot your phone and check out your awesome new boot animation.

If you are having a hard time following the instructions on this post, you can check out the above steps performed in this video:

If you ever wish to disable this, simply flash this disabler zip file and you will be back to your old SAMSUNG logo animation.