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Hey there,
I recently posted here about looking for a new phone on a budget. I'm happy to say that after a few weeks I've narrowed down my options to a shortlist of 10, using gsmarena to compare specs. I'm now at a point where I need to fill in the final gaps, but I'm unable to do so without an intimate knowledge of the devices, Android or the Android rooting scene, none of which I have, so so am at the mercy of the community for any further help.
I need to know whether each of the below phones satisfies two specific criteria.
These are the phones that I'm looking at:
- Honor 8
- Honor 8X
- Honor 9 Lite
- Honor 9
- Honor Play
- Huawei P20 Lite
- Motorola Moto G6
- Moto G6 Play
- Motorola Moto G5S
- Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite
For each of them, I'd like to know...
1. Whether it supports split-screen multitasking. Odd as it sounds, one of my biggest reasons for moving to Android is the ability to use YouTube while using other apps, so the phone I buy needs to support it. Based on my research, I have a feeling this is entirely independent of hardware, and that all of these phones should support a high enough Android version to use split-screen, but I'd like to confirm this.
2. The state of the modding/rooting community for the device; how much the phone supports modding and how active the community around it is. The other reason for moving to Android is the ability to customise things to my heart's content, based on the criteria outlined here. Does the phone in question support Magisk, TWRP, Treble, ElementalX? Are there any modding-related that I should know about it?
Once in again, thanks to anyone who's read through this properly and can answer these questions, it's much appreciated.
Thanks
If you want a rootable phone, drop all Huawei phones from your list
How can I know if my Realme phone has the Chinese ROM, or Global ROM, (besides the label on the box)?
Is there a section in the settings app that provides such info?
Also, if a malicious seller installs Global ROM on the Chinese variant hardware and tries to pass it as a genuine global variant, how can I identify such fraud?
Or, can I just enter the IMEI on a website fo check its ROM edition?
P.S. I have never used a Realme or OPPO phone.
( In Xiaomi phones, Global version phones have "MIUI Global" written in their phone settings' About section. Also, these phones have ROM codes ending in ***MIXM. While Chinese version phones have ***CNXM. Is there a similar info to be found in Realme ColorOS Settings?)
LeHalua said:
How can I know if my Realme phone has the Chinese ROM, or Global ROM, (besides the label on the box)?
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Click to collapse
There is barely any difference between the two but Chinese Rom is different because it's codename isn't Realme 5 Pro but Realme Q. It's almost impossible not to notice. If you had Chinese rom in settings about phone there would be Realme Q under model label, not realme 5 pro. Furthermore in case you didn't notice that there would be preinstalled Chinese market and apps and less or none Google stuff.
LeHalua said:
Is there a section in the settings app that provides such info?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
On stock rom go to settings and about phone.
LeHalua said:
Also, if a malicious seller installs Global ROM on the Chinese variant hardware and tries to pass it as a genuine global variant, how can I identify such fraud?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If the seller for some reason put global rom on your model which was made for Chinese market (which I highly doubt for it's no easy feat and takes time+effort furthermore it'd not worth it from the perspective of the seller) then there's no way you could notice that.
Except if you're a very advanced user like me. There are tiny differences between Chinese model hardware and global hardware so you shouldn't worry. There are two key differences (which I think are rather hardcoded than hardware limitation). One is that Chinese Realme Q has smaller system partition size for Chinese rom uses less storage because missing Google stuff. Other is global and Chinese variant modem antenna seems to support different 4G bands. Obviously Realme Q supports bands that are frequently used in China while global supports bands that are used in worldwide. This means Realme Q hardware is limited thus doesn't support European B7 and B20 4G bands.
LeHalua said:
Or, can I just enter the IMEI on a website fo check its ROM edition?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know about such method.
LeHalua said:
P.S. I have never used a Realme or OPPO phone.
( In Xiaomi phones, Global version phones have "MIUI Global" written in their phone settings' About section. Also, these phones have ROM codes ending in ***MIXM. While Chinese version phones have ***CNXM. Is there a similar info to be found in Realme ColorOS Settings?)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes. And more obvious.
Chinese market>Realme Q (RMX1971CN)
Global>Realme 5 Pro(RMX1971EX)
But don't bother trying to find device codenames with non-root apps. They don't make a difference between RMX1971CN and RMX1971EX.
Some extra info and details:
I ordered a Realme Q from China via AliExpress last October. Since then I'm using my device in Europe, Hungary and I'm in love with it. All the technical details I shared are results of personal testing and debugging. I'll tell you why you shouldn't worry about a Realme Q sold as a Realme 5 Pro.
If a seller wanted to do this for some reason they'd need to ask for official bootloader unlock from Realme. After getting the unlock approval (which isn't nearly sure for monthly unlock cap is 1000 device) they'd need to flash a custom recovery on it and clean flash a Realme 5 Pro global rom on the device. Fastboot flashing doesn't always work with this method. Furthermore because Realme Q system partition isn't as big as Realme 5 Pro's there would be complications.
After successfully flashing Global rom on the device the seller would need to flash back stock recovery and relock bootloader. This would likely confuse the device and cause bootloop. This whole procedure is timely, lots of effort required and some serious skill. As conclusion it is totally pointless and not worth it for any seller. The procedure is nearly the same on Xiaomi devices. So such logic applies there as well.
greenys' said:
If the seller for some reason put global rom on your model which was made for Chinese market (which I highly doubt for it's no easy feat and takes time+effort furthermore it'd not worth it from the perspective of the seller) then there's no way you could notice that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In some South/Southeast Asian countries, Chinese versions of phones sell cheap, but obviously people want the global version. That's why sellers used to do such scam. It seems unbelievable but it used to be very common in countries like India. But after makers like Xiaomi locked down their devices (e.g. bootloader unlock waiting period, anti-rollback protection, ROM flashing requires unlocked bootloader even if it's meant for the same device, etc.), this practice has all but disappeared. I wasn't really sure if a newer brand like Realme would have similar protections, but seems like they do have them. So I guess I'm covered.
And thanks for your comprehensive answer. It's really helpful.
On a side note, does ColorOS/RealmeOS have these features built-in: call recording, screen recording, dual-apps/clone-apps, second space/parallel space, etc.?
LeHalua said:
In some South/Southeast Asian countries, Chinese versions of phones sell cheap, but obviously people want the global version. That's why sellers used to do such scam. It seems unbelievable but it used to be very common in countries like India. But after makers like Xiaomi locked down their devices (e.g. bootloader unlock waiting period, anti-rollback protection, ROM flashing requires unlocked bootloader even if it's meant for the same device, etc.), this practice has all but disappeared. I wasn't really sure if a newer brand like Realme would have similar protections, but seems like they do have them. So I guess I'm covered.
And thanks for your comprehensive answer. It's really helpful.
On a side note, does ColorOS/RealmeOS have these features built-in: call recording, screen recording, dual-apps/clone-apps, second space/parallel space, etc.?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The more I know. No bigge. I try my best. I barely know anything about Color OS for I'm a real pure android lover thus ditched Cos after 3 days. I can't really comment on these features.
Hello,
I wanted to see if anyone made LineageOS work on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra SM-N986U1. I would consider it a nice replacement phone for the ZTE Axon 7 I have currently but I can't find anything so I am posting here. I currently have the DooGee S95 Pro that I am trying to get the LineageOS GSI of LineageOS 18.1 running but it won't boot.
Thanks!
Good question, wrong thread man
Oh sorry what place should I post it then?
Don't get this phone if you want custom ROMs. I couldn't get Lineage GSI to work but if you can then it's not going to be as good as Lineage built for the specific device.
OnePlus 9 Pro or even literally anything else would be a better choice.
Hello,
Hardware is better than the DooGee S95 Pro by a lot, I can get the GSI to load on the DooGee S95 Pro and wanted this phone because the bootloader is unlockable and we can then have custom rom. I like this phone because 5G, SD card slot, Note series with Stylus, wireless charging at 15w, NFC, and really nice screen. Any recommendation on a better phone then? I am running LineageOS on the ZTE Axon 7 and havent found anything better... sadly.
Apparently the OnePlus 9 Pro doesn't have an SD card slot, the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G has pretty much every great hardware feature I could want ( no mention of a notification LED but yea ) but no mention of good software like LineageOS on it... Q_Q
So nobody's going to port over LineageOS? Too bad.
get a xiaomi if you want custom roms man,.i had plenty on k20pro
I was working on it for a bit but i cant get 18.1 android 11 to boot. it goes straight to bastboot. ive spent hours on it but no luck. 17.1 i got going but ril is all borked, no wolte (which i guess is a samsung wide thing with LOS so i dont know if it is even fixable) no 5g and because lte doesnt work phone calls drop to 3g AND SMS only works on EDGE connections lol. then i got bored and have been playing with smart home crap but thats a story for another day lol. its sad but i think the custom rom scene is dying. its a shame really. all us developers made imprvements and then the big companies copied them and now no one except the REAL nerd hard core users feel the need to root or flash a custom rom on their phone. years ago it was almost a requirement to have a good experience on the device. hell los invented the notification quick tiles.. anyways i had 1 to many beers and went on a tandget there sorry, i'm going to bed now.
if anyone feels like it my WIP tests are on my github
github.com/Albinoman887
its a huge mess with many branches for each repo that are just tests or crap or dont even compile with non descriptive names for comits and stuff but there things that are worthy. (DUB3 kernel merge comes to mind)
I truly like LOS. If some developer could get a stable 18.1 version for the Exynos Variant, I would unlock my phone, and change the OS to LOS
marcusah123 said:
Oh sorry what place should I post it then?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just found the thread by accident and moved it to the Q&A section. If you realise that you've posted in the wrong section just hit the report button to alert the moderators team.
Regards
Your friendly neighbourhood watch.
Hello,
What's required to make LineageOS actually work? What help is needed? I'm not an android developer but it would be nice to know what I can do to help.
Thanks
P.S. I also have experience installing GSIs on phones and in my experience the GSIs won't load on Android 11 if it's either the wrong partition type OR for the Android 9 device I have it wouldn't load 11 if the bootloader code had been modified with Magisks and I had to put the boot code back to stock and then it booted so it might be something like that.
Hope that's a little helpful. I know this thread is getting old though...
Hi, I like the phone but also I want to put some tweaks like 90hz display, custom roms, pixel 6 camera features(motion mode), kernels...
will we see a lot of development as in the xiaomi poco f1 or not?
thank you
If you have a Xaomi, i recommend keeping it a little longer. Roms for this devive are in a weird situation because the only 2 stable ones are calyx and graphene which arevboth great, but they are both very barebones and kind of difficult if you aren't experienced with degoogling
Twilightsparklez said:
If you have a Xaomi, i recommend keeping it a little longer. Roms for this devive are in a weird situation because the only 2 stable ones are calyx and graphene which arevboth great, but they are both very barebones and kind of difficult if you aren't experienced with degoogling
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thank you, but with the same cpu as pixel 6 and 6 pro, it will be easy to port roms from pixel 6?
charly30 said:
thank you, but with the same cpu as pixel 6 and 6 pro, it will be easy to port roms from pixel 6?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, adding Bluejay is possible. Whether developers choose to do it is another question.
Velocity will be ready for public release soon. I'm just buttoning up a few more things.
I noticed with the phones I've own, custom ROM seem to get me frequent as the phone gets older and the stock rom releases begin to vaporize. If the phone has enuff hardware power n memory AND there's no more factory support (as in many older midrange Motos). The Moto G5+ and G5S+ had active 'post' communities as did the G6...I got a G7 cuz of 4gb memory figured it'd be a big post EOL project/rom phone BUT I missed the fact that moto was following google with the whole dynamic update w/ dual A/B slots which killed our beloved TWRP custom recovery and nandrive image backup.
BUT is u weren't into rooting/tweaking then that explains why Android Police named it the #1 phone for running LOS! Esp. after Moto released thr Android 10 kernel source code!! This is the main reason I didn't sell/trade it off...and ofc my wife put one of those sky-blue 2pc cases from Poetic and claimed it! lol
Maybe i should
I want one too, just seems like no one has been interested in developing after the Poco x3 pro was dropped, being to do with the SoCs being used or something. I don't want to be forced to use garbage miui :'( or whatever the Poco reskin is called.
LaikaTheBigRedDoggo said:
I want one too, just seems like no one has been interested in developing after the Poco x3 pro was dropped, being to do with the SoCs being used or something. I don't want to be forced to use garbage miui :'( or whatever the Poco reskin is called.
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Click to collapse
so there will be no custom roms for x5?
Would help if Xda opened a sub forum for the non pro model.
Yeah. I know this device just launched 5 weeks ago, but if I'd suspected the X5 5G would get so little love here at XDA, I might've gotten the X4 Pro instead...
I'm actually looking into compiling my own TWRP recovery for it, and an AOSP ROM when I've learned enough about custom ROM development.
Is there any way to request XDA consider opening a forum for a particular phone?
Spaceboy60 said:
Is there any way to request XDA consider opening a forum for a particular phone?
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Click to collapse
Well I guess you could PM one of the admins/mods, but final decision would be up to their goodwill (or lack thereof), evidently.
It would make a lot of sense to create a dedicated forum though, as the X5 is powered by the Snapdragon695 and not a 7xx series as the X5 Pro is, which *probably* means that ROMs for the latter wouldn't be flashable on the former -not without incurring risks anyway...
Snakeforhire said:
Well I guess you could PM one of the admins/mods, but final decision would be up to their goodwill (or lack thereof), evidently.
It would make a lot of sense to create a dedicated forum though, as the X5 is powered by the Snapdragon695 and not a 7xx series as the X5 Pro is, which *probably* means that ROMs for the latter wouldn't be flashable on the former -not without incurring risks anyway...
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Click to collapse
Can't the Poco X4 Pro and Poco X5 5G use the same ROMs as both have same CPU, GPU, chipset, architecture, flops etc?
chrome99 said:
Can't the Poco X4 Pro and Poco X5 5G use the same ROMs as both have same CPU, GPU, chipset, architecture, flops etc?
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Click to collapse
There's usually a firmware, boot and vendor img difference which does make it incompatible, in most cases, and would need some tweaking to make it work right. But you're welcome to give it a test run, learn from experience. There are times with OEMs are lazy and it does actually work.
EricEsq said:
There's usually a firmware, boot and vendor img difference which does make it incompatible, in most cases, and would need some tweaking to make it work right. But you're welcome to give it a test run, learn from experience. There are times with OEMs are lazy and it does actually work.
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Click to collapse
even for custom ROMs? Incase the X5 does't gain popularity (which seems to be the way it's going), I was wondering if we could use custom ROMs for X4 pro in the future.
chrome99 said:
even for custom ROMs? Incase the X5 does't gain popularity (which seems to be the way it's going), I was wondering if we could use custom ROMs for X4 pro in the future.
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Click to collapse
Yep. It's uncommon to be able to use a different device's ROM even when the specs are similar. Unless you're using a gsi. It takes a while before custom roms start appearing after a phones release. Debloat and use as is would be my recommendation till then, if you already bought the phone. The Pro version is also likely to be more popular, among the enthusiast community, from what I can see.
So there's likely to be some trickle down effect of roms from the Pro versions to the non-pro
EricEsq said:
Yep. It's uncommon to be able to use a different device's ROM even when the specs are similar. Unless you're using a gsi. It takes a while before custom roms start appearing after a phones release. Debloat and use as is would be my recommendation till then, if you already bought the phone. The Pro version is also likely to be more popular, among the enthusiast community, from what I can see.
So there's likely to be some trickle down effect of roms from the Pro versions to the non-pro
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Click to collapse
Which is ironic, because the X5p does not have any kind of possibility of storage expansion by SDcard (while the vanilla X5 does provide a shared SIM/SD slot), making even the 256Gb version utterly useless for my use cases...
Snakeforhire said:
Which is ironic, because the X5p does not have any kind of storage expansion by SDcard possibility (while the vanilla X5 does provide a sgaredl SIM/SD slot), making even the 256Gb version utterly useless for my use cases...
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Click to collapse
To be fair, it's been a while since I've seen anything that has the 7 series chipsets to have a hybrid or dedicated SD slot. Just how the market playing field is, once you enter the mid-high range. Not great for the customer but that's capitalism for ya.
The Poco X5 5G may not be as popular as the Pro, but it's actually a very smooth phone if you don't play demanding games. Just received Android 13 update last night. My biggest gripe is the MIUI, which I don't like. After installing Nova7, the user interface is a lot more familiar and better.
priority1 said:
The Poco X5 5G may not be as popular as the Pro, but it's actually a very smooth phone if you don't play demanding games. Just received Android 13 update last night. My biggest gripe is the MIUI, which I don't like. After installing Nova7, the user interface is a lot more familiar and better.
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Click to collapse
For daily use, it is quite smooth, the camera performance is trash though. GCam fixes most of it but the videos are still grainy. The X5 might be catching on now as it has received a big discount on an e-commerce platform recently. Nova or Lawnchair makes the experience pleasing but you miss out the gesture navigation which is a bummer.
Hello!
Is it possible to turn off the images of the camera settings in the Portrait mode of the Poco X5 5G/Poco X5 Pro 5G?
If possible, then it would be possible to shoot video in video bokeh mode.
My phone turned itself off today. Has anyone had this issue before?
priority1 said:
The Poco X5 5G may not be as popular as the Pro, but it's actually a very smooth phone if you don't play demanding games. Just received Android 13 update last night. My biggest gripe is the MIUI, which I don't like. After installing Nova7, the user interface is a lot more familiar and better.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seconded !
I've used the Microsoft Launcher for a long while before I bought the X5 5G a week after its global launchdate, but in the long run on MIUI 13 it turned out to be just too goddamn much of a battery hog...
So upon reading a comment from another member here that he was very satisfied with Nova I decided to give it a try, and felt so at ease with it that barely 20mins passed before I bought the Premium version. xD
But I do sorely miss the MS launcher's leftmost pane tho (the one where you can take quick notes and display your Outlook calendar, which is what I used it most for). :/
priority1 said:
My phone turned itself off today. Has anyone had this issue before?
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Click to collapse
Yup. I traced it down to a dirty fingerprint sensor : some oil or grease traces would make it wrongly detect a long press or multiple short presses and trigger a shutdown.
A good, energetic cleaning with a rubbing alcohol-imbibed tissue then a thorough drying fixed it right up!
Any new news on custom roms? I want to get the phone on sale but I dread using MIUI