https://www.gsmarena.com/honor_pad_2-8390.php
Believe me, the the price under SGD$200 this pack a punch. The processor is fast and the graphics is fantastic. All was great. Google was in, by using Google Installer right from Huawei App Store. Then one day, shit happened. There was a Firmware upgrade Build JDN-AL00C233B023 that came along. There was no cancel option, just OK (Actually should have just shutdown or reboot...) but itchy fingers just did it anyway.
What happened? Google Play is a perpetual white screen. There was no error. Nothing. After days searching over the Internet, it was indeed confirmed that this firmware killed Google. The last working firmware was Build B018. Many smart people manage to downgrade it back and I had tried all options, download the OTA Full firmware. Reboot holding Vol + - and power... All in vain. Mainly because I made 2 critical mistakes.
1. Feeling too confident, I did not bothered to unlock the bootloader when I had the chance before Huawei shutdown the support to do so.
2. Without a unlocked bootloader, there was no way to get root. Thus, no way to TWRP, which enables firmware download so easily.
Guess I learned it the real hardway. I resorted to using APK install, APKPure marketplace etc. But life is not the same without the (official) Youtube and Chrome (Opera was decent, but... one kids make choices, adults wants all)
So a year had passed, I tried a few times, Google installer v2 v3, plug in power during flashing. The flashing always failed at some point. Read all the XDA post, downloaded all the firmware I could find. Nothing helped. NOTHING.
Until May 2020. The pad was in great condition and fantastic as ever, but without Google. This stupid trade war had damage users more than anybody else. Imagine, a perfect hardware and simply no real use for it because of its stupid software system (Yeah, I know its the same with Apple, but you asked for it when you bought that!).
So, a Russian friend pointed me to a forum. (Yes, not all Russian are hackers ok? Although I suspect he is one too...). The forum is PDA4u, which is.... famous for hacking.
https://4pda.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=778914&st=40
My Russian sux so I had to use Google translate, but this time I did several things slightly differently.
1. System reset the tablet.
2. The Tablet was on full charge.
3. On the Pda4u thread, it seems to be a review, but go to page 6 on and you start to realized it is about hacking the device (typical Russian, not that I was to stereotype...).
4. But whats important there on Page 6 is the link https://yadi.sk/d/NeU_-gJ73HEdKc which points to the OTA Full firmware. With doubt it would work, I downloaded it AGAIN.
5. Extracted the Update.APP into DLOAD main folder on the SD card. All done on the phone itself.
6. I know normally, there is where you go and power down, Vol whatever + Power up to service mode... but This is the critical part that I think I did wrong in the pass (Not really wrong, but my fault for not rooting in the first place).
7. Somewhere on Page 13 (Yes, I dam read all those Russian until page 13...), there is a post about entering Engineering mode by dialing "* # * # 2846579 # * # *" and call.
8. This is somewhere I had not explored and inside Software Upgrade > SDCard Upgrade. Just run it and then I got error "PT Error" or something. Which I do not care, I assumed it doesn't work anyway. But what follows was it started to reboot. So I let it.
9. The tablet was in the Vol + Power screen updating (downgrading) the firmware as before. Which had failed zillions of time. So much so that this time I did not even bother to go plug it into the power (which I did in the past just to make sure). Guess what, carelessness pays off. The downgrade worked. Maybe the tablet finally sensed that I did not even care about it so much so that the firmware could kill it if it run out of power.
10. No Bootloader unlock. No Root. Just like that. After reboot, its B018 again. Everything is wiped again as usually and I installed back Google Play thru the old Google Framework Installer v2. After that there is a updates to Google as well, but it doesn't break anything anymore.
Now, if you bothered to read on in the forum, they talked about how to disable future updates. Which is also very important. I did not want another accident to happen. This part, I figured out on my own. I located the "Updater" App in the option menu. Then I basically disable all permission. No network, no disk storage. With this, even if it somehow knew there was a upgrade, it still cant write to disk so cannot download it. Also disable all the notification. But there is one notification left though.. its from System telling you that if you disable network/disk access, the system cannot update. This one happens once after a reboot. So who cares. Just remember never to say yes to that. I might actually try to fix that someday, but for now. This was the greatest downgrade ever for me.
I know I should reply in the forum track just for thanks and all, but I am not sure I can write in Russian was well as I would love to....
There are also 2 other points I need to point out here.
1. There is no such thing as a GLOBAL ROM for this model. If there was, Google would have been there and there was absolutely no problem at all in the first place. What many sellers posted about GLOBAL ROM is just having B018 with Google Play installed.
2. There are 2 versions of this tablet. The other one is W09. Please DO NOT cross flash the firmware. The W09 version is exactly the same but without LTE. It is the Wifi only version. Also, this version is a lot easier to downgrade, has its own instruction which I will not discuss here. There had been cases people tried to use the W09 firmware on the LTE and effectually broke their LTE by doing so.
