cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19576153

I don’t need it to be with zero effort, but most of the instructions I find these days on XDA forums are extremely ambiguous and assume the reader is someone who does this every day and therefore knows most of the steps and what the terminology means.

Years ago when I used to do stuff like this more, directions were written meticulously and without abridgment of any elements. Seems today it’s not common for someone to go to the effort.

I’m extremely proficient, that’s not the issue. It’s just most instructions say stuff like “Step 1: root the phone. Step 2…” I’m like “whoa excuse me… how do I root this phone?”

Anyway, so all I’m asking is are there just comprehensive directions for any of these.

  • tomatoely@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    For the moto E4, Motorola has a guide in their support site to unlock the bootloader. I used it to be able to flash a 64bit rom for my moto g4 plus and the process was pretty straightfoward, although you do need a pc to use the adb command line tool.

    • AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      That’s cool. I have adb on my machine.

      So did you do any alternative rom or just flash to get a clean copy? I’d love to put something else on there it’s actually a pretty nice device. I usually don’t love Motorola but they have their gems here and there.

      • SaltyIceteaMaker@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        You could try to flash a generic android image, although it seems like those have degraded in quality judging from the linus tech tips video that mentioned this

        • ILikePigeons@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          GSI (Generic System Image) ROM-s do have bare-bones apps due to their nature of being mostly designed for developers. That won’t really be a problem as you can just install better alternatives to those apps. The problem with these ROM-s is that they most likely won’t have drivers for the camera for example. Also the phone has to be Treble-compliant and it has to come with Android 9 (ie. it has to be preinstalled, devices that have been upgraded to Android 9 aren’t supported.)

      • tomatoely@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Oh yeah. My initial plan was to install termux on it and use it as a server for a simple webpage I wanted to make, but the official rom i had was 32bit and the newer termux releases only support 64bit os.

        I was going to give up, but while digging for more info I found out that for some reason the chip on my moto g4 was 64bit but not the OS. So I searched in the depths of the xda forums for a 64bit rom, which resulted in way too many dead links and dubious sources. Ended up using some obscure anime themed custom rom that crashed whenever I wanted to open the camera or use the flashlight BUT, it installed and ran termux nicely.

        Overall I got what I wanted, but there wasn’t any good quality rom I could find as they all had some sort of flaw. Hope you get better luck though! Those phones are still perfectly usable if not for lack of software support