Android Pie ported to the Honor View 10, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and more

Android Pie is the hottest topic in the Android community right now. After releasing on the Google Pixel and Pixel 2, Essential PH-1, independent developers on our forums have been hard at work porting the latest Android release from AOSP to their devices. We’ve already seen the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Mi 3, Mi 4, Redmi 4X, ZenFone Max Pro M1, and the OnePlus 2/3/3T/X receive unofficial ports of Android 9 Pie, and now the Honor View 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro are joining the short list of devices with ported Android 9 releases.

This is possible thanks to the efforts of XDA Forum Moderator/Recognized Developer flex1911 and XDA Recognized Developer LuK1337. The developers ported the latest release of Android from source and managed to boot it up barely a week after the public release of Android Pie. We should note that the developers only officially support the Honor View 10 with this build of AOSP, but other Project Treble-enabled Huawei and Honor devices can boot the same build of AOSP too. Some devices needed a patch to the surfaceflinger binary and libsurfaceflinger shared object library, while others worked just as well as the View 10 without any additional patches. (The developer’s latest release implements this patch so you don’t need to manually overwrite the files like I had to.) Since this is an early build, there are going to be some bugs. Here’s the current list of bugs:

What doesn’t work:

• MTP USB doesn’t work on BKL-L04 (U.S. version)
• The camcorder is buggy on BKL-L09 (and other variants that use Android 8.0 Oreo vendor image)
• Wi-Fi Hotspot doesn’t work
• Known issues from the LineageOS 15.1 release

Before we show you the list of compatible devices and link the thread, let’s address the obvious: You will need an unlocked bootloader to install this ROM. This may seem obvious to many, but we have to address this since it’s no longer possible for any user to generate new bootloader unlock codes. If your bootloader isn’t already unlocked, you can’t unlock your bootloader now to install this, or any future, custom ROM. The decision by Huawei to close down the bootloader unlock form saddens us because, without an unlocked bootloader, it isn’t possible to install early releases of the next Android release. It could take months for any of these devices to receive an official Android Pie update, and some of them might not receive the update at all.

Install unofficial Android 9 Pie for the Honor View 10, Huawei Mate 10 Pro, and more

Simply follow the instructions in the thread linked below to install this release of Android 9 Pie on your device. Here’s the current compatibility list, as provided by the developers:

• Honor View 10
• Huawei P8 Lite 2017
• Honor 7X
• Huawei Nova 2i
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
• Huawei P20 Pro
• Honor 8 Pro

Download Android 9 Pie ported to the Honor View 10 and Huawei Mate 10 Pro

Tips and tricks for Huawei/Honor users with unlocked bootloaders

Since the number of new Huawei/Honor users with unlocked bootloaders will eventually dwindle, there aren’t going to be very many new guides for Huawei/Honor devices being made. For those of you who are new to modding Huawei/Honor devices and grabbed a bootloader unlock code at the last-minute just so you could install custom ROMs like these, here’s a few important things for you to learn about your device.

Learn your button combinations

• Hold volume down and the power button when booting and connected via USB to PC/power and you will boot into the bootloader mode.
• Hold volume up and the power button when booting and disconnected from USB and you will boot into the phone’s installed recovery (stock or TWRP).
• Hold volume up and the power button when booting and connected via USB to PC/power and you will boot into Huawei’s eRecovery* mode.

*eRecovery is a special recovery on Huawei and Honor devices that lets you fully factory restore your device over Wi-Fi. eRecovery is pretty unreliable for users outside of China, so unless you are using a special DNS/proxy service like FunkyHuawei.club, the Wi-Fi restore method will probably be useless for you. Still, eRecovery is one of your absolute last resorts to unbrick your device, so you should NEVER modify any eRecovery partition.

Learn your partitions

Interested in installing TWRP or rooting your phone with Magisk? That’s cool, but save yourself some headaches by learning what partitions TWRP/Magisk modifies on Huawei/Honor devices.

• TWRP is installed to the recovery_ramdisk partition. (No Huawei/Honor devices support A/B partitions just yet, so there’s still a dedicated recovery partition here.)
• Magisk is installed to the ramdisk partition. (Unlike most other devices where the ramdisk is packed in the boot partition, Huawei/Honor devices split the boot partition into dedicated ramdisk and kernel partitions.)

Get a backup of stock partitions

If you install TWRP, you can make a backup of any partition you’re going to modify like system, ramdisk, and vendor. After installing TWRP, you should backup oeminfo. This partition includes important data like your IMEI and device branding. You won’t (or shouldn’t) ever touch this partition if you flash custom ROMs, but if you ever plan on re-branding your phone, you’ll definitely want a copy of this partition just to be safe.

Lastly, if you want to be extra safe, download the latest version of your stock firmware (“full OTA”) from Firmware Finder and extract the partitions from the update.app file using this guide. Keep them around for when you can only access the bootloader and need to flash images via fastboot. (Since installing TWRP requires modifying the recovery_ramdisk partition, this is actually the only way to get a backup of that partition too.) You’ll want to be intimately familiar with flashing images via fastboot anyways if you plan on flashing a Project Treble Generic System Image (GSI).

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Enjoy custom ROMs on your Honor or Huawei device while they last! I learned all the above via trial-and-error while experimenting with GSIs on the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. I hope this knowledge helps you save some time by not having to beg the XDA forums or Discord/Telegram chats for help if something goes wrong.

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