Unofficial CyanogenMod 13 Lands on the Honor 8

Honor's partnership with us at XDA gave rise to a lot of hope. While Honor has been making affordable and yet appealing hardware for a while, the thought of running Honor's custom skin often turned away tinkerers. Forum dwellers seeked ways to get the AOSP experience on such capable hardware, and a partnership like this was the perfect opportunity to turn around developer perception of Honor devices with regards their general tinkerability.

For Honor 8 owners, this partnership has brought about good news in the form of CyanogenMod 13. While not the absolute bleeding edge in terms of Android versions as CM13 is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, this does bring the AOSP experience to the device, allowing users the choice to run an alternative to Honor's EMUI skin.

The ROM is maintained by XDA Recognized Contributor surdu_petru. The ROM is a Work-in-Progress Beta as there are a fair few bugs that need to ironed out. The bug list includes issues with NFC, GPS, Fingerprint, Camcorder and Encryption, as well as the absence of dual-SIM support; all of which may affect its general usability as a daily driver. But for a project that has just been released for the public, the progress is commendable and things will only improve as more people contribute back to the project.

The ROM supports all FRD versions of Honor 8. To install the ROM, you would need an unlocked bootloader as well as the special TWRP for CM builds on this device. For download links of the ROM and TWRP, as well as links to the Open Source Device Tree for the Honor 8, check out the CyanogenMod 13 thread in the forums!

For an OEM that was generally unknown for supporting development, the presence of an AOSP alternative, even if it originates from the community, is a step in the right direction in our books.

What are your thoughts on this CyanogenMod 13 build on the Honor 8? Let us know in the comments below!

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Magisk Receives an Update to V9, Prepares Itself for MultiROM Support

XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor, topjohnwu, is well known for his modification, Magisk. Magisk lets you apply certain root modifications to your phone or tablet, and then unmount those changes when you want to do something like check for an OTA update, or use Android Pay (both of which cannot be done when you have modified the /system partition). Magisk has been receiving steady updates since launch, and yesterday Version 9 of the mod was released.

There are a lot of changes going on with this latest version, even if you don't see most of them on the surface. topjohnwu tells us that this update is laying the ground work for version 10, which should bring a much-awaited feature to Magisk: MultiROM support. To start off, this new update brings an end to cache (aka post-fs) modules for Magisk. topjohnwu says this is the biggest change as one of the biggest advantages to Magisk was the ability to mount files before data and build.prop.

With this update, Magisk will actually remove all of the cache modules you have installed under /cache/magisk. Users will also no longer see cache modules when using Magisk Manager 2.5, so developers will have to update their modules to the new system. Thankfully, there is a new system in place that topjohnwu is using instead of the previously mentioned cache method. This new tool is called resetprop, and was originally called xsetprop as it was initially developed by XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor nkk71 as a way to bypass SafetyNet.

Version 9 also greatly improves Magisk Hide, which includes another way to bypass SafetyNet. topjohnwu advises that you update phh superuser to version r266-2 or higher, as older versions will not work with Version 9 (so you'll want to update phh superuser before updating Magisk). We also get an update on Magisk's progress for the Pixel and Pixel XL. The developer is unsure if they want to use Chainfire's closed source solution, but they would love to try and figure out an open source way of doing this.

Be sure to check the XDA forum link to look over the full list of changes going into Version 9!

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Huawei Executive Confirms Lack of Branding as Reason for Declining Pixel Production

The HTC-made Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL are fiercely marketed under the "Phone By Google" campaign. Since Google did exert a heavy influence on the design and continues to put forth large budgets on marketing and advertising the Pixels, mores so than it did for any Nexus so far, we would not blame the average user if they did not know that HTC is actually manufacturing the devices.

And that is exactly why Huawei declined to produce the Pixels. Back in October, reports originated that Huawei was apparently Google's first choice for producing the Pixel duo. Talks originated between Google and Huawei for the production of three devices, but the parties could not come to any agreement on the same. Google then had to approach HTC for the manufacture of the Pixel, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Huawei Executive Colin Giles, speaking to WinFuture, confirmed the reports on Huawei being given the opportunity. He also mentions that the reason why an agreement could not be reached is because it was unacceptable for the company to produce a device with no influence on the branding or promotional material. Huawei wished to expand its brand presence in the US market as noted in earlier reports, so the lack of branding would have created little awareness of the brand within the average consumer. Huawei had also decided some years ago that it would not be a contract-job OEM for other brands to ride on, so Google's demands of a Google-heavy smartphone were not in line with Huawei's vision.

Is this the end of the road for Huawei-Google? Apparently not. Huawei continues to insist on its partnership with Google, and leaks have pointed that the company is in line to produce the hardware for the upcoming 7″ tablet that will feature Google's unannounced Andromeda OS. We will have to see whether Huawei has budged from its position and given in to Google branding, or if Google has relaxed its demands for the partnership.

Would you have preferred a Huawei-made Google Pixel? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: WinFuture

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TWRP has been released for the Google Pixel and Pixel XL

Let the custom ROM flashing begin!

One of the most common reasons that users come to our forums is to flash custom mods, kernels, or ROMs. Developers pour countless hours into customizing their software for the benefit of the community. But none of this work is feasible without having a means to install these modifications.

The first step required before you can step into the world of Android modding is to unlock your bootloader. For users of the Pixel and Pixel XL, this step is already possible on all variants of the two devices. The next step is to flash a custom recovery image that will allow you to then flash custom ROM or kernel images as well as allowing you to make full system backups in case anything goes wrong. That's where the incredibly popular Team Win Recovery Project (TWRP) comes in.

Available on a plethora of devices from nearly every OEM under the sun, TWRP has been the go-to custom recovery for anyone looking to modify the software on their device. And now, the two Google Pixel phones can soon join in on that fun. XDA Senior Recognized Developer Dees_Troy has just released the first TWRP alpha for the Google Pixel and Pixel XL. Provided that you've already unlocked your bootloader, you can now flash the recovery onto your device. Although, there are a few changes to the way TWRP will be installed that we should note.

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Installation

If you've ever manually installed TWRP onto your device, then you might be familiar with the fastboot commands needed to flash the TWRP image to the recovery partition. Due to the partition changes made for 'seamless updates' to work in Android Nougat for the Pixel and Pixel XL, you will NOT be issuing those same commands. Forget everything you think you know, and carefully read the following instructions before you act. In essence, what you will actually be doing to install TWRP is to boot the TWRP image, then using the automated installation script which will handle flashing TWRP to both boot partitions.

First up, if you haven't already you'll need to grab the Google USB driver as well as the fastboot binary (we recommend downloading and extracting Minimal ADB & Fastboot to the directory of your choice). Next, download the appropriate TWRP installation files for your device (Pixel and Pixel XL). You will need to move the .zip file onto your device's internal storage, but leave the .img file on your computer. Then, open up a command prompt and check that your device is recognized by issuing fastboot devices into the command prompt. If you see your device's serial number, then the fastboot protocol detects your device. Finally you'll need to temporarily boot up the TWRP image by issuing this command:

  fastboot boot path/to/twrp.img  

Note that "path/to/" refers to the actual directory in which the downloaded TWRP image file is located. Make sure that you are issuing fastboot boot and not fastboot flash, and that the file you are booting is not the zip file. Once you've issued the boot command, your device will retrieve the TWRP image from your computer and temporarily boot into TWRP. You're almost done at this point.

All that you need to do now is to make TWRP survive a reboot by flashing it to both of your device's boot partitions. Thankfully, all of the work there is handled by the automated installation script that you downloaded earlier. Simply use the TWRP interface to navigate to and install the TWRP installation zip just like you would install any custom ROM, mod, or kernel zip. After that, TWRP will be accessible to you no matter which active partition slots are being used.

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TWRP Alpha v1

Since this is an alpha release, there are bound to be issues. Right now, Dees_Troy has outlined three issues to be aware of. First up, due to the introduction of File Based Encryption (FBE) in Nougat, data restoration might pose a problem.

File Based Encryption (FBE) can be a tricky. If a restore doesn't work correctly, it can trigger an automatic wipe of your data. I've tested it a little on my Pixel XL, but I haven't had time to test it extensively. Sometimes TWRP will fail to prompt you to enter your password or otherwise fail to set up decrypt properly. If this happens, reboot TWRP. It seems to be some kind of timing issue and I haven't had time to track it down yet.

There's no saying it may happen to you, but it could happen to you. If you don't regularly make backups of your data offline or on the cloud, then don't be shocked when something goes wrong and your entire data is wiped. I've had that happen to me before, and it sucks.

Next, if you are currently using the multi-user feature (including guest features) on your device, then you will want to avoid using TWRP for now.

File Based Encryption means that each user's folders are separately encrypted. To make a proper backup, factory reset, etc, we would have to have the user decrypt for every individual account on the device.

At this time, TWRP only supports single user setups even if you happen to know the encryption password of the other users on your device. Dees_Troy has told us that he has successfully decrypted additional users using a command line tool, but that implementing this feature in TWRP isn't a high priority right now and may instead be released in a future update. Last week our XDA Twitter account polled users on behalf of Dees_Troy asking if they utilize the multi-user feature, and the vast majority stated that they do not use multi-user, so we don't expect this limitation to affect very many people.

Poll: Do you regularly use the multi-user feature to share your phone with another person?

— XDA Developers (@xdadevelopers) November 6, 2016

But there is one more issue that is more relevant to the vast majority of users who will be installing TWRP. Currently, SuperSU will not function alongside TWRP.

Installing TWRP at this time will remove root if you are currently rooted. A SuperSU update will be required to allow TWRP and SuperSU to co-exist.

Dees_Troy explained the reason for this interference to XDA-Developers as such:

Chainfire uses the ramdisk of the bootimage to do his system-less root. This is the same ramdisk that Google intended to be used for recovery. I am pretty sure that Chainfire will be able to come up with a way to make it work with TWRP, but TWRP needs a small change to the init binary to make decrypt work properly and Chainfire needed a different change to his init binary to make his ramdisk work for both normal boot and recovery.

In other words, Chainfire's systemless root method modifies the same binary that TWRP needs to modify in order to get data decryption working. Therefore, when you flash TWRP you are overwriting the changes made to the init binary by Chainfire's systemless root method. While this is a minor setback, thanks to the dual partition nature of the Pixel (and future devices shipping with Nougat), TWRP has some nifty new capabilities.

Pixel devices have 2 "slots" for ROMs / firmware. TWRP will detect whichever slot is currently active and use that slot for backup AND restore. There are buttons on the reboot page and under backup -> options to change slots. Changing the active slot will cause TWRP to switch which slot that TWRP is backing up or restoring. You can make a backup of slot A, switch to B, then restore the backup which will restore the backup of A to slot B. Changing the slot in TWRP also tells the bootloader to boot that slot.

What this essentially means is that you'll soon be able to dual boot on your device. Unfortunately, since custom recovery has just been released, it will take some time for your favorite custom ROM developer to cook up something in the kitchen for your Pixel phone.

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Download TWRP for the Google Pixel Download TWRP for the Google Pixel XL

Do you plan on running a custom ROM or kernel on your device, or will you remain on stock firmware? Let us know in the comments below!

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Titanium Backup Team Releases ‘My Titanium’ App to Showcase their Upcoming Apps

Whenever we talk about rooting an Android device and go on to list out the possibilities of what we can accomplish after rooting, one of the top suggestion that flows in is to enable the user to take a backup of their app and its accompanying data. And whenever we talk about backing up, mentions of Titanium Backup are bound to pop up.

And that is not without good reason. Titanium Backup has had downloads in the range of 10 Million – 50 Million from the Play Store ever since it got listed on. It is also one of those apps that has a consistently high rating, getting an average of 4.6 stars from more than 350,000 ratings. It's one of the earliest apps that continues to retain its popularity and fan following. And to top it all off, it is among one of those rare apps that still boasts compatibility with Android versions going back all the way to Android 1.6. Yes, the app looks very dated in terms of UX, but the functionality it offers continues to remain unparalleled.

So, when Titanium Track, the team that handles Titanium Backup, launched a new app, we had to take note.

Enter 'My Titanium', the latest app from Titanium Track that will primarily serve as a showcase to their other upcoming apps and services. By itself, My Titanium is not very exciting from a consumer perspective. The app acts as an information portal, letting us know more about what else the team has in store.

My Titanium gives us an early look at the next two apps that the team is working on: EvGenie and MyTi.cloud. In a gist, EvGenie is a collaborative calendar which helps you plan events and do much more, while MyTi.cloud is a Swiss digital safe, intended to keep your data away from prying eyes of mass-market cloud storage providers. EvGenie stores your events and related data in MyTi.cloud, and so will Titanium Backup, wrapping up the package. You can learn more about these apps from their announcement blog post and from within the My Titanium app.

Pricing of MyTi.cloud and EvGenie are on a yearly subscription model which revolves around the storage slab you opt for, starting at about $21 for 10GB of cloud space and scaling up to around $105 for 10GB. While the pricing is steep, there are pre-order offers thrown in, with the best offer essentially making the bundle a one-time purchase.

What are your thoughts on MyTi.cloud and EvGenie? Let us know in the comments below!

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Google Brings Machine Learning to Google Play Music

Google has just announced a brand new update to their music streaming service, Google Play Music. The new design and features will begin rolling out to Android, iOS and the web starting this week, and Google says it will be made available to 62 countries around the world.

As with most of these app updates though, it will be rolled out gradually to users. So, you can either wait patiently for the update to be pushed to your device, or you can sideload the update when it becomes available.

The first thing you'll notice about this update is its new design. Google wanted to make the application easier to use so it redesigned the home page. So as soon as you launch the Google Play Music application, you'll be greeted with some personalized suggestions about what it thinks you want to listen to based on what you like. The more you use the service, and the more you tell it what you like and dislike, the more useful this home screen will become.

Presenting you with music you like isn't enough for Google though, they wanted to take it a step further. So they have integrated the company's machine learning technology into the service. This means that it will use other pieces of information (if you agree to it) about you to offer some music. For instance, it can offer you a workout playlist when it detects you are at the gym. Or it can offer you a specific genre that it knows you like to listen to while you're at work.

Also, if you subscribe to the Google Play Music service (by itself or via YouTube Red), then it can prepare an offline playlist based on what you were listening to, just in case you lose connection to the internet.

Source: The Keyword

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qeuBot Adds in a Personal Chatbot to WhatsApp

If you are looking for a personal chatbot for your WhatsApp conversations, check out queBot! queBot can perform online and offline operations through WhatsApp, without needing to register or adding any phone number.

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