[Samsung Galaxy S7 Themes, Apps, and Mods] ZigBrick:
So you all know Samsung has been busy for a couple of years now region locking their phones -correction: our phones!- for their sales and marketing strategy or whatever and has been hurting us, the individual users, along the way. This is considered ridiculous by those of us who love buying the phone from wherever they want, using it wherever they want, and using whichever firmware they want. Buying a Galaxy S7 phone on a trip to Europe and failing to make the 5 minutes local activation call (as per the hidden fine print under the box seal) should never force you to send the phone back to where you bought it (that's Samsung's official response!!) And so, the challenge was accepted.. we fight back!

Latest information on the region lock:

The region lock is not as simple as it first seamed and will not be affected by sales code changes, product code changes, stock firmware flashing, rooting, hard resets, or upgrades.

The lock information is stored in an encrypted lock info vector stored in an encrypted block in the nv_data.bin file.

It's not clear how similar the region lock is to the SIM locks, or carrier network locks. But from the feedback of other owners, most services that offer network unlock codes mention that they don't support unlocking the new region lock by Samsung.

More recently a few independent service providers explicitly announced they support removing Samsung regional lock for anywhere from $20 to $45 depending on the region and the service provider. But unfortunately the service could be go down for some regions at any time for an extended duration. Again Samsung is responsible here because these services seem to rely on accessing a database if IMEIs and unlock codes managed by Samsung itself.

On a different front, a couple of the service providers seem to use a direct cable unlock method to remove all sorts of locks of various phones through communication with the phone's modem through AT commands. This method does not depend on any databases and so has leveled the play field, returning the control back to us.

Taking it from there, we had a look at the android RILJ, the native RILD, and even gave the firmware of modem a shot. The Ril.java class in the com.android.internal.telephony package showed a very solid hope: nvReadItem and nvWriteItem methods. However, working around the security measures involved in protecting the interprocess communication with the service stub implementation earned us nothing but disappointment when the 2 methods returned "not supported" error when executed through the RILD. The RILD analysis gave some similar false positives.

Finally, we found what we wanted after inspecting the modem.bin. The following 2 strings were found surrounded by AT commands and looked exceptionally interesting: +NVVALUEREAD and +NVVALUEWRITE. From there, we followed through and managed to use those to create the Galaxy Region Unlock app which allowed us to instantly remove the Samsung region lock on a Galaxy S7 G930F that had been locked to the European region (and who knows what other phones of the Galaxy family and what other sorts of locks it could be removing along the way!! any adventurers? :) ). In addition, the app allowed changing the product code without resetting or even restarting the phone!!

One catch though. The region unlock method hooks seems to have been killed from the modem in builds BPH1 and above (meaning new firmware released starting

August 2016

). It was working on APEQ modem build. But still, not a big deal, we have the old working modem firmware lying around and can flash it temporarily if needed.

Compatible Phones

:

Samsung Galaxy S7 G930F (Exynos)

Compatible Modem Firmware

:

G930FXXU1APEQ

G930FXXU1APB6

Enjoy the victory!

P.S. I'm trying to attach the apk here but I can't figure out how! Will make an edit afterwards once I figure out.

Update: Still can't figure out how to add an attachment. Can't add a link to the app on Google Play either for now, but you can easily find it on Google Play by searching using "

com.ZigBrick.GalaxyRegionUnlock

".