A few months ago, Samsung decided not to update the Samsung Galaxy S III to the latest version of Android. The reason of this shameless behavior was pretty trivial since they were having issues with TouchWiz and its bloat-related heaviness. The international variant of S III has only 1 GB of RAM and we have seen KitKat ports running flawlessly on devices with 512 MB of RAM.

The Korean variant of the S III codenamed as E210S, with 2 GB of RAM and LTE, got an official update to Android 4.4.4 a while ago. Everything has been running perfect, so the community decided to do the necessary and port the E210S' version to international variant of SIII. The fun fact is that XDA Senior Member arter97 and his team needed just few hours to assemble a quite functional build.

An unofficial official ROM (sounds quite fun) has a few issues that separate it from being stable. Known issues are signal strength being displayed wrongly and SMS messaging. We are keeping our fingers crossed for the developers to fix those issues soon.

Once again the community has shown big OEMs that “impossible” things can be done within just few hours. TouchWiz for Samsung Galaxy S III is just an example.

If you own the international version of the S III, make your way to the development thread to get the latest unofficial port of Android 4.4.4. If you are an owner of the Korean variant, visit the post by XDA Senior Member LKS007 to get the system image.

[Big thanks to XDA Forum Moderator Siberian Tiger for the tip!]