Huawei’s Honor 8 Pro can now have the TWRP recovery flashed and be rooted, thanks to XDA Developers user OldDroid. TWRP is reportedly working perfectly fine, aside from some apparent hangups when it comes to messing around with partitions that are encrypted. In order to install TWRP, the user must simply boot the phone into the Fastboot mode by turning it off, then holding down the volume down key and connecting the device to a computer via a USB cable. Once the handset is connected, the standard “fastboot flash recovery recovery.img” command will work just fine over ADB to flash TWRP. From there, even on a fully encrypted device, root can be achieved by flashing PHH’s SuperUser through TWRP. If one wishes to decrypt in order to install something like Magisk or SuperSU, or possibly use custom ROMs in the future, the only solution is to wipe the phone’s DATA partition, which will erase things like user app data, then flash a kernel that supports decrypted operations.
For the time being, even with the bootloader unlock being possible through official channels, the Honor 8 Pro does not have any custom ROMs available simply because the device is so new. Stock firmware is available for a fresh flashing to clean up the device if a user wishes to, but AOSP-based custom ROMs like LineageOS probably won’t arrive for a little while longer. Since Huawei’s subsidiary is fairly open about development related to its devices and often releases the source code for its phones, users likely won’t have to wait long before they can build AOSP from the source tree for the Honor 8 Pro themselves.
The Honor 8 Pro was released this April, serving as an incremental update to the flagship Honor 8 and boasting Huawei’s powerful Kirin 960 silicon alongside 6GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage that can be bolstered by a MicroSD card if a user is willing to give up one of the two SIM card slots of the handset. The 5.7-inch display panel of the phone supports a maximum resolution of 1,440 by 2,560 pixels, meaning that content viewed normally will be sharp and clear, and VR content will still have some noticeable pixelation but will be far crisper than anything on a 1080p device. Dual 12-megapixel cameras adorn the back of the handset, and an 8-megapixel unit is found on its top bezel, while the device itself is powered by a 4,000mAh battery.