Last winter I managed to unlock my Huawei P10 Lite’s bootloader but failed to install any ROMs. Recently, I’ve finally decided to get a new phone (the full rationale to be detailed in a future post, but in essence Huawei and Huawei device users are in a pretty bad position in the US) and just to experiment I tried updating my phone again. My current phone is at build number WAS-LX3C605B176, Warsaw probably being the codename for the phone, LX3 meaning 1 or 2 SIM, Latin America variant, C605 being the region code for Columbia (region code list), and presumably B176 the actual build number (details about naming in Alexxxx1’s dload method guide). I don’t remember the original build number of the phone, but since I used the extremely useful KingOfMezi’s EMUI 5.1 Firmware Compilation to unbrick my phone, I was stuck with the version he provided, which is B176, kernel built on Oct 9 2017 (again a huge thank you to KingOfMezi).
The version EMUI’s System Update wants to update to is B188, from May 2018. All official Huawei firmware in the form of UPDATE.APP can be found on Team MT’s online firmware database, which despite being in Russian seems more trustworthy than sites like huawei-firmware.com because the filelist links really point to update.hicloud.com, where official OTA updates are downloaded from. (Many a dubiously-legal software, from Steam Workshop content to papers to Android ROMs and firmware to old LEGO games, come from Russian sites. Team MT’s site also looks really useful for people who actually use EMUI.) B188 is probably the last EMUI 5.x build, given that all higher build numbers appear to be for EMUI 8, and if what Alexxxx1 says about LX1 (EU model) applies to LX3, I need to be on the latest EMUI 5.x builds to theoretically safely upgrade to EMUI 8. The latest update was from March of this year so maybe Huawei has abandoned updates. The XDA P10 Lite dev subforum has decent activity but trying to update has been so time-consuming I’m not going to bother.
I could not get any other firmware to install, even after trying Huawei’s built-in updater (dload on Internal Storage) and the SD card dload method with varying folder structures. Worse yet, when I tried to do a full TWRP restore from all partitions, which should work but surprisingly doesn’t, I was back to the crippled hardware mode I ran into last post, where various hardware components like speakers and camera weren’t working. I learned my lesson last time dealing with this but apparently I forgot it. Along the way I tried debugging with ADB but unlike last time I could not figure out how to get past ADB saying the phone was unauthorized, even after messing around with ADB keys.
It took me several attempts of using KingOfMezi’s firmware to get my phone fully functional again, because I forgot that the firmware ZIP is flashed through his TWRP and not by directly flashing boot.img and system.img through fastboot. I actually had to read my old blogpost to remember this so these posts are for my reference as well. Once I tested out the stock firmware to make sure it wasn’t crippled, I could restore my data partition from my January backup.
I’ve given up on this phone and I’m currently waiting to setup my new phone, which should have a much friendlier modding community and not be such a pain to use ROMs for. I could’ve tried to flash a different region (with the goal of updating to EMUI 8) but I’m not optimistic about that either. I am doing this as a hobby but it’s not fun to waste time and be frustrated with a lack of results.