I got a Sumsung S4 Mini in late June this year. It was quite a blind purchase – I’m on a shared plan with my mother-in-law and her family, and she gave me some options over the phone to choose from. I chose that one.
I was a bit peeved to find that it was only on 4.2.2 Jellybean but I read up a bit and learned that Samsung had announced that they were going to, in the near future, update I9195 models to KitKat. So I waited.
And waited.
Earlier this week, I got on the phone with Samsung support and got absolutely no help - according to the lady on the phone, if Kies doesn’t give me an update, that’s all there is to say about it. Kies is the bottom line of Samsung updates.
So I consulted Google.
I found this post and followed the steps, and it worked like a charm! I wouldn’t necessarily trust any links anybody puts on random blogs – and some of those links looked ultra-sketchy – but if you follow the directions and find your own links to comfortably safe downloads, it works a treat!
My only reason for making this post is to increase the search visibility of the solution. I struggled for quite a while trying to find out how to update to 4.4.2 manually, and I’m hoping the next guy who wants to update without waiting for Kies has an easier time finding the answer than I did.