For Many years, in years gone by, I was an avid enthuiast of flashing custom OS and kernels onto Android phones. This was, naturally, during the golden age of the hobby. There were countless options and the future seemed bright. Time and life wore me down to the insane time commitment this type of tinkering can demand and I let the years go by ... it seems most of community did the same. It's harder now. Less benefit for more work and the looming certainy that your efforts can and will be nerfed in a coming update. Bummer, guys.
Oh well, life moves on. I picked up an older tablet a little while back, anyways, and found myself really craving the form factor for my current life situation. Not too big to be a burden but bigger than even my big honkin phone (and, cruicially, not the black hole of bleak distracting notifications my primary phone oft must be). Anyways, this little tablet fits in my hand perfectly but it was SLOWWWWW. Still receiving updates to the newest OneUI interfaces seems like a bonus in theory, but the limited memory and storage just can't keep up with the demands of the newest firmware, so i decided to jump in and "quickly" flash an AOSP Rom to the thing and see if I couldn't make it a bit crisipier.
quickly. 🙄 damned fool that i am. Due to both my own need to explore possiblities and the complexity and choas involved in this work - it's now been over a week and the thing is soft bricked. i have GBs of duplicated filepieces scattered between my Windows 11 laptop and my ParottOS laptpo and the cloud. Dozens of different custom recoveries and partially flashed tar balls that were once crucial componenets and no longer hold any meaning to be but to remind me that I stoppped doing this for a reason!!! Bah, who am I kidding. I enjoy this kind of thing more than I do gaming or watching TV. So, I guess for now anyways - I'm once again doing this shit. Hah! It's inspired me to add it to my collection of services offered by my business, as I've wanted to offer more of my skills to consumers rather than the business world for some time and this fits. I can take your older tech and upcycle it for you - keeping it interesting and functional for years longer than its planned obseleseance would want it to. That said ... this shit takes ages and you can't really charge an amount worth the time involved - so this won't exactly be a front line offering! VIP clients only, kind of thing. If that's you, hmu :P
For now - I am creating this repo to try and wrangle the mess i've made into a coherent and reproducible stack of files, links, and walk throughs so that I can actually get it done and maybe then do it again!
It's a public repo and this should all be publicly available FOSS so if this helps you, or you want to help me - Welcome!
| Product Name | Galaxy Tab A7 Lite |
|---|---|
| Model Name | SM-T227U |
| Serial Number | *************** |
| IMEI | *************** |
| OneUI Version | 6.1 |
| Android Version | 14 |
| Google Play System Update | August 1, 2024 |
| Baseband Version | T227UVLUAFXH2 |
| Kernel Version | 4.19.191-28847731-abT227UVLUAFXH2 |
| Build Number | UP1A.231005.007.T227UVLUAFXH2 |
| SE for Android Status | Enforcing SEPF_SM-T227U_12_0001 Wed Aug 07 18:40:12 2024 |
| Knox Version | Knox 3.10 Knox API Level 37 |
| Service Provider software version | SAOMC_SM-T227U_OYV_KDO_14_0004 KDO/KDO/XAC/KDO |
| Securtiy software version | ASKS v7.8 Release 20240926 ADP v3.1 Release 20230510 SMR Jul-2024 Release 1 |
| Android Security patch level | July 1, 2024 |
| IMEI SV | 11 |
I have learned, through failling, that this particular tablet is a particularly obstinate little bugger to crack - but only because of its US variants with no LTE services. the 2220 and 2250 models have locked bootloaders with no official path to opening up and because they are by and far the most common variants there is not a lot of work done in the community to help me get through this. There's enough that I CAN .. just not enough to have dozens of easy walkthroughs to follow.
In fact, no walkthrough I have found has been totally accurate (which is common enough, but more so on this bastard). So I am making this repo to keep it all together in my head and possibly release it to XDA when done so that it could help the 3-4 people who might try to do it themselves before this thing is just too old 😅
| LINK | DESCRIPTION | NOTES |
|---|---|---|
| https://drive.proton.me/urls/KAW49A061W#qDMOcY1RKBQo | Stock Firmware 1 | KooDoo version. As original |
| https://drive.proton.me/urls/Y4M4W23PP0#c1SyhJnitsKy | Stock Firmware 2 | non-KooDoo? Will this work?? |