[Update: Side-effect of an OTA] PSA: Huawei is disabling rooted phones from booting

Huawei and its sister company Honor have been having a choppy time with the custom ROM community lately. A while ago, they completely stopped users from unlocking their bootloaders. Now, they are disabling rooted devices from booting up.

Update 9/9, 2:10 PM/CT: Apparently, it turns out that all this was caused by an unintentional OTA.

On a bunch of Huawei Phones (Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, P9) Huawei has rolled out a new OTA called: “patch01.” The changelog is very vague and mentions some fixes which do not reference this issue. They say they have fixed bugs such as MMS, however, the main purpose of this patch is to disable the ability to root devices.

What this means is that if someone flashes Magisk with TWRP or flashes a patched_boot.img to ramdisk and reboots the phone, the phone will get stuck on the splash screen, saying “Your device cannot be trusted.”

The only solution to this is to flash the original Huawei ramdisk.img. But this means you get no more root access with Magisk.

However, if the downgraded firmware has another Xloader.img then this means you might end up with a bricked device if you continue running root on your stock ROM with OTA updates enabled.

Update 9/9, 2:10 PM/CT: After an investigation by developers from XDA, it has been found that the cause of the bricking was unintended and was due to an OTA. Consequently, a fix is now available for this issue at this thread.

Huawei still deserves flak for their bootloader unlock policy, but, for now, it seems that there are no plans to kick out the 5 million users with unlocked bootloaders.

End of Update

Source: XDA-Developers