HTC ONE M8 - Never meet your Hero
This believe it or not was my first "hero device" (yeah I know it is more used in the context of cars like "Hero Car" aka. the most over the top version of there lineup) but I was not able to effort it. Not over nearly 14 years later I got a notification from eBay that one nearby is for sale! So... I lowballed the guy so hard LOL. I payed 15 euros!
Of course it needed to be cleaned and the battery was beyond cooked, literary any task at all was instant power off. Not like I would have trusted that thing even 1mm. I replaced it and that was were I really understood HOW TERRIBLE HTC IS IN MAKING PHONES! That thing is snapped together, the mainboard sits on top of the battery that is as deep as possible between everything. Now the best part, EVERYTHING USES RIBBON CABLES AROUND THE BATTERY! And many that don't even look like once! Many covering tape (yes parts are healed by tape) have black pull parts you are meant to grab. And white ones that are in two place are just fucking ribbon cables! It is an unbelievable pain getting the battery out without breaking everything. And when putting things together after having a tiered brain is the most fun because forget one cable and it will crush the battery's backside... . I can nut emphasize enough how bad this thing is build! Not like apple where it is just build to hate you, it is just badly design and made. BUT...
...BUT the phone itself from the software to the performance, even today, is impressive. The camera is good, the 3D effect is really cool and the screen looks really nice for an IPS even (And IPS already usually look nice)! The metal feels good in the hand and the size is perfect. But that is where it ends already again... a 32bit OS (64bit SOC btw. so... yeah... 2GB more RAM and a 64bit OS and the phone would even today work well and is again HTC doing things the worst way). The M9 fixed the RAM and probably the 64bit OS issue 1 year latter LOL... can not confirm that because I don't have and want one. The bootloader unlock needs a website and it is still online for some reason. Many custom roms are available, but official support from LineageOS ended with 17.1 (Android 10). And with that installed it works well, if sometimes slow because of RAM and eMMC (because of course HTC...) sometimes. The speakers are impressive to this day but this is where I end this entry. It is a terrible phone with a good packing around it. Never meet your hero.
A few notes:
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BACKUP YOUR STOCK ROM:
Almost all Downloads for the firmware are offline and as far as I could tell there was never a flash package made by HTC (I found a few links, but those are almost all TWRP backups, so they can only fix so much... just save yourself the pain and make a backup before doing stupid stuff). If you don't, forget getting ever back to Stock without risking and trusting a lot of janky stuff. Just DON'T flash TWRP! Use "fastboot boot twrp*.*.img" after unlocking, make a NANDROID backup and copy it to your PC. NOW you can start modding sh*t! Consider your NANDROID backup as important as a "Stock Rom Package"!
To pull TWRP backups from the phone you NEED to reboot into TWRP. There you can pull the files with "adb pull /external_sd/media/0/TWRP". That is mainly because the SD-Card gets mounted as internal storage and is annoying to access with adb in Android then.
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Misc improvements:
Root with Magisk, get the official .apk from GitHub and rename it to .zip, flash it in TWRP, boot and then in Android install the Magisk App and follow its guide to finish the process with a direct install. Then install AdAway and set it up, Install BusyBox from F-Droid, then get a Kernel Manager like "Smart Pack Kernel Manager" and enable Z-Ram on boot and set it to 512MB!
I also recommend my usual stuff like setting every app's battery manager as aggressive as possible, set all Animations to 0.5 in the developer settings and enabling force apps to SD-Card. The phone is old and uses eMMC and later I add swap too so the storage needs a break somewhere (it is also at max. 32GB, often only 16GB... so just put a 64GB SD-card in it and format it as internal storage). The same as with the CAT-S22 apples here surprisingly! Don't reboot. Shutdown and Boot fresh if you want the SD-Card to mount with no issues and apps that have root or need to run in the background MUST be on the internal storage!"
When booting into TWRP or fastboot it can happen that Magisk disables the Modules. Just turn them on again and shutdown and boot again.
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Adding Swap:
The phone (the Kernel) has no swap by default and not everything is available. This can thankfully be fixed (mostly) because swap is still compiled into the Kernel.
This is in parts based on:
https://xdaforums.com/t/los-swap-mem-snappier-than-ever.3875219/
Create the Swap like this in a adb shell:
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su
cd /data
mkdir swap
cd swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1048576 count=4096
mkswap swapfile
sysctl vm.swappiness=75
swapon /data/swap/swapfile
Now check with htop or an Kernel app from F-Droid if the Swap is on. It should show 4GB!
If everything worked out, add the Magisk module below and turn the phone off and on (It just runs the swappiness and the swapon command on boot as root. That's it). I could have made the Magisk module do it it self but I could not be bothered:
Download: AutoSwapOnOnBoot.zip
- The System-Web-View needs to be replaced, it is too outdated and insecure. Still looking for a clean solution.
I linked everything I dug up on the Internet and Archives for the phone bellow. Just... just don't. It is not worth it.
Hashes for the last official LineageOS builds pre-build still online on Archive.org:
1b99966256ac44d46f015a3355853170fb63269ea34811b1501eb83ddc2e1687 lineage-17.1-20220211-nightly-m8-signed.zip
4e07b00e1dc1a5fa5e130ad8a89008fc386e28a042b8d0b5a41df336fa04144c lineage-17.1-20220211-recovery-m8.img
582249b7ff0c436998c81f20adc7a4b74f98aec443d82b34a7d25077189c87f7
Sources: