[Huawei MediaPad M2] beast.in.black:
Q: Dear beast.in.black,

I bought my M2 with a lot of great expectations, but I am bitterly disappointed by the lack of volume on the phone speakers; a sparrow's fart is louder than the in-call volume even with my volume controls at maximum.

Due to this issue, I am unable to have dirty phone conversations with my significant other while I am in a crowded place because I am unable to hear what's going on even if I enable the speakerphone and set it at max volume.

Also, my heavy metal music playlist has turned into easy listening elevator music because I can't play it loud enough to make my eardrums bleed like I used to on my old phone, and now all the ear bandages I bought are useless.

I am unable to get used to the feeling of nonbleeding ears and this may cause me and me and me to develop another psychiatric disorder before too long.

Please help me.

(Signed: A desperate M2 user)

A: Dear desperate M2 user,

I too feel your pain because I have been in a similar situation with my M2.

Luckily for me (and now for you), I was able to figure out a way to boost the volume on the phone to allow the max possible volume (as far as I currently know) - if you set the volume control to max - for all applications including call volume.

No volume boost apps are required for this technique!

*** DISCLAIMER *** The procedure required to boost the volume on the phone to the max allowable (at max value of the volume control sliders) requires your phone to be rooted, and involves messing with a critical system file called build.prop, so if you're not comfortable with voiding your warranty and the possibility of damaging your phone, walk away now!

If you choose to continue, you will be solely responsible for any and all consequences and outcomes of your actions - I disavow all responsibility and accountability for you, your phone, your actions, your life and your sanity (or potential lack thereof).

No offense meant. Just standard CYA :D

Short Answer (for those who know what they're doing):

Edit the file /system/build.prop and comment out the line which starts with ro.config.hw.security_volume so that it looks like this (note the # symbol at the beginning of the line - this is what turns it into a comment instead of an active line of configuration info):

#ro.config.hw.security_volume=6

Note that the number after the equals sign may be different for you; the above value is what I had on my M2-802L.

You can even delete the line entirely if you're feeling particularly brave - it doesn't seem to have affected anything else on my phone.

Long Answer:

Rambling introduction:

OK, we need to go into some history here.

In days of old, phones had decent volumes if they were manufactured with decent hardware (DSPs, speakers etc), and all was well on this green Earth.

However, some idiot (probably at Apple, they love to do idiotic things in the name of "courage") decided that a phone which you could actually hear stuff out of was gauche, proletarian and unrefined, and that it would be oh-so-much-more upmarket, refined and sophisticated (meaning: "Goshdang! We can charge people a boatload more money and become filthier richer!") if people couldn't actually hear anything out of a device whose primary raison d'être is, you know, communication.

So phones (especially the ones from the more pretentious manufacturers) started artificially limiting their volumes in software even if the hardware was perfectly decent and was actually capable of melting your ears. And thus arose the burgeoning plethora of volume boost apps -some good, some indifferent, some downright nasty.

"But beast.in.black," I hear you cry desperately, "what does all this have to do with me? I just want my phone volume to be loudererer! Enough with the Verbal Kint schtick!! Get to it already!!!"

Well, geez!

Ok then!

Here's what you need to do:

Prerequisites:

Your phone needs to be rooted.

If you're not yet rooted but would like to do this, follow the Rooting guide if you are feeling adventurous and really want this (see DISCLAIMER above).

You need to have a good file explorer on your phone.

I can heartily recommend MiXplorer - it's an open source fully-featured file manager (check out the XDA thread in my link), and is developed and maintained by XDA member HootanParsa. It has a bunch of capabilities including native SMB client support to connect to a share on a Windows machine, and has an inbuilt text editor (which will shortly become rather important, as you'll see).

You need to have a text editor on your phone.

If you install the MiXplorer file manager like I recommended above, it comes with an inbuilt text editor which is more than adequate for the job.

Since I use the vim editor in life, I also personally like to use it on Android phones in its VimTouch avatar. If you don't know what vim is, I suggest that you not find out right now; save it for a more leisurely occasion. Install some other text editor from the play store - whichever one grabs your fancy and can get the job done.

Method:

Using your file manager of choice, navigate to your /system directory.

In the /system directory, you should find a file called build.prop. Select this file in your file manager and open it in a text editor (your file manager should give you various options to open the file, one of which should be the appropriate text editor app).

After the text editor has opened the build.prop file and you can see its contents, search for a line which starts with the following text (I have not shown any text on that line which comes after the word security_volume):

ro.config.hw.security_volume

*** CAUTION *** Many entries in this file look very similar to each other, and it is very possible that you can end up inadvertently choosing a line of text which is not the correct line. Make doubly sure that you are on the correct line by making certain that the line contains the text security_volume.

Changing the wrong line could lead you to soft-brick your phone, and trust me when I say that dealing with a bricked Huawei phone (especially when Huawei, just to make your life more difficult, has pulled the ROM for your particular model from all their support sites) is a gigantic migraine headache that you most definitely don't want to experience if you can possibly avoid it.

After ensuring that you've found the line of text in the build.prop file which starts with ro.config.hw.security_volume, comment it out by placing a # symbol at the beginning of the line so that the start of the line of text looks like this (note the # symbol at the beginning of the line - this is what turns it into a comment instead of an active line of configuration info):

#ro.config.hw.security_volume

Note that you can even delete this line entirely if you're feeling particularly brave - it doesn't seem to have affected anything else on my phone. However, since you're following this long version of the answer, I would recommend that you just comment it out for now.

After commenting out the above line of text, save the changes you made (I certainly hope that you didn't change anything else) to the build.prop file.

After making sure that your change to the file was saved correctly, exit the text editor app.

Restart your phone.

Enjoy your new face-melting, ear-blood-inducing, heavy-metal-rocking volume levels :highfive:

Extra fun and profit for experts:

I haven't yet experimented with this myself, but I think that it may be possible to set a custom max volume threshold by varying the numeric value of the ro.config.hw.security_volume config parameter.

On my phone it was set to 6, and I think that perhaps the absolute max value it can take is 10 (denoting full hardware phone volume), although that is a guess (albeit a logical guess) and we need to experiment find the actual range of values that this parameter can take.

Once the range of values is determined, then it would be possible to write an app that could set a custom max volume threshold by varying the value of this parameter as requested by the user.

Enjoy! :cyclops: