Huawei has been producing some great value-for-money smartphones under its Honor branding, be it the Honor 9 lite providing great value in the budget segment, or the Honor View 10 and Honor 10 making headlines in the budget flagship space for some great offerings for the asking price. Huawei has been using its homegrown series of Kirin chipsets in its devices along with a custom OS based on Android, namely EMUI or Emotion UI. EMUI offers a ton of features and customizations, but it need not necessarily be as per your liking. So if you own a Huawei/Honor device and are a fan of stock android, fret not, as there’s a new way in which you can flash an AOSP based ROM on your device without much effort.
OpenKirin is a new project that basically enables you to flash an AOSP (Android Open Source Project) based ROM onto your Huawei/Honor device. The project currently supports 17 smartphones and tablets running on EMUI 8. The ROMs that are currently supported are – Lineage OS (The successor to the very well-known CyanogenMod), Resurrection Remix OS, and Carbon OS.
If you wish to know if your device is supported or not, you can check out the list in the images below, but in short, if your device runs on the Kirin 655, 658, 659, 960 or 970 SoC, then your device is supported.
This project was made possible thanks in large to Google’s Project Treble which a lot of Huawei/Honor phones running on EMUI 8 support natively. The system, mandated by Google for Android Oreo and beyond, makes it much easier for manufacturers to update their phones to newer versions of Android by using a Generic System Image.
If you wish to flash any of the ROMs mentioned above through the OpenKirin release, you will have to unlock the bootloader of your device, which Huawei will only allow until the July 22nd for some weird reason, so you better get going soon by visiting this link in order to unlock the bootloader and you can go here here to flash the ROM of your choice.