Smartphones and tablets produced by Huawei and their daughter company, i.e. Honor, have their own software installed by default. EMUI, because of this, it is a deeply modified Android, to the extent that it is difficult to find elements of AOSP in it. This overlay has its supporters, but also a large group of people who do not like it. Changing this system was not so easy, Huawei does not provide sources and it’s hard to build custom ROMs for smartphones with Kirin. This is starting to improve thanks to the Treble project, which is something that was supposed to speed up Android updates, and it also turned out to be a salvation for developers writing ROMs.
OpenKirin is working on 17 Huawei and Honor devices!
OpenKirin is a team of developers unrelated to Huawei EM, who aimed to provide AOSP to the largest number of devices with the Kirin. So far, they are doing quite well, they already support 17 devices and this number will probably increase gradually. Unfortunately, this project only covers smartphones and tablets with EMUI 8, the older versions of the OpenKirin support system will not. Below is a list of devices for which custom ROMs are available:
- Honor 6X
- Honor 7X
- Honor 8 Pro
- Honor 9
- Honor View 10
- Huawei Mate 10
- Huawei Mate 10 Pro
- Huawei MediaPad M5 8.4 “
- Huawei MediaPad M5 10.8 “
- Huawei MediaPad M5 Pr
- Huawei P10 Plus
- Huawei P10
- Huawei Mate 9 Pro
- Huawei Mate 9
- Huawei P Smart
- Huawei Mate 10 Lite
- Huawei P10 Lite
If you are interested in the AOSP vision on your Huawei or Honor, and your device is on the list above, then I recommend hurrying up. While the installation of the ROM prepared by OpenKirin itself is not particularly difficult, to be able to do this you must have the bootloader unlocked. Unfortunately, from July 22, Huawei will stop giving consent to anyone willing, and this may work very badly for this project. As you can see, these companies are not very favorable to the modifications. For more information, or for links to download ROMs, I refer you to the developers’ website, here.
Do you think of “pure” Android as the best system, or do you prefer it with the overlay of a producer? Write in the comments!
