[Honor 10 Guides, News, & Discussion] mrspeccy:
Dear community,

I recently bought a Honor 10 (AL-10 C00) with 6GB RAM and 128 GB flash memory from China. Since I did not want to use Chinese apps and some of these were really resistant to my attempts to remove them (like the voice search attached to the home button), I researched xda-developers quite extensively for ways to rebrand the phone to a European version (more precisely, L29 C432). In particular, I read the tutorials made for "related" models such as P10, P20, Mate 10, Honor 9, and HonorView 10.

In detail, my plan was to move from firmware COL-AL10 8.1.0.139 (C00GT) to firmware COL-L29 8.1.0.131 (C432), noting that the L29 firmware had a somewhat lower version number than the AL10 but was the most recent available at the time of trying the rebranding. My concern was therefore that the rebranding might brick the phone similarly to what was observed on the Mate 10 (https://xdaforums.com/mate-10/how-to/discussion-hard-brick-infos-t3789044). Fortunately, the xloader-check tool from https://xdaforums.com/mate-10/how-to/beware-bla-l29c432b147-t3817241 displayed "02 XLOADER" for both firmwares, so I decided to proceed.

I obtained all firmware files using HuaweiFirmwareFinder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teammt.gmanrainy.huaweifirmwarefinder), paying attention to the fact that only full OTAs can be used for the branding. In the following description, I used 3 ZIP archives containing the L29 8.1.0.131 software, renamed to match the scheme "update.zip, update_data_public.zip and update_all_hw.zip".

My first attempt was to imitate the approach from the tutorial https://xdaforums.com/huawei-p20/how-to/rebrand-huawei-p20-eml-l29-eml-l09-t3779283 made for the P20. I followed the procedure with the following exceptions:

- Magisk and TWRP were already on the phone thanks to the tutorials from the Honor 10 section.

- I took the nocheck-recovery for the View 10 instead of the one for the P20, more precisely I installed "recovery_ramdisk_BKL-L04_nocheck.img" from https://xdaforums.com/honor-view-10/development/recovery-bkl-nocheck-recovery-flash-t3778085.

- In Step 17, I said ./oeminfo COL-L29 C432 hw/eu

(By the way, the oeminfo binary is a great tool that allows you to change only the relevant portions of your oeminfo partition related to model number etc. It keeps things such as IMEI intact, so that the bootloader unlock code does not change by the rebranding, contrary to FunkyHuawei's procedure, as it seems.)

After booting to nocheck-recovery, an EMUI update screen was shown and slowly counting up, but after a while an error message of the kind "Installation failed" popped up and forced me to make a factory reset. Still, the bootloader was unlocked afterwards and I could reflash TWRP. The state of the phone now was that it had rebranded oeminfo, an unlocked bootloader, a working TWRP but no real operating system.

The second and final attempt was to use HuRUpdater (https://xdaforums.com/honor-9/development/tool-flash-official-firmware-recovery-t3769279). I rebooted to Recovery, placed the 3 ZIP files and the HuRUpdater ZIP in the top directory of the internal memory (accessed via USB), chose "Install" with respect to the HuRUpdater ZIP, waited some minutes and saw the phone rebooting to EMUI 8.1 with many preinstalled Google apps. Success.

I think it should have been possible to skip the step using nocheck-recovery that failed anyway, provided that the oeminfo binary is executed from TWRP before flashing via HuRUpdater. Any further information would be helpful.

This morning, the firmware update COL-L29 8.1.0.143 (C432) arrived. I downloaded the full OTA and installed it via HuRUpdater as described above. The phone runs very smoothly so far. A scrreenshot of the "About phone" page is attached. Note the 6GB RAM that comes from the Chinese version.

I am happy to answer questions and would like to read more about your experiences with rebranding the Honor 10.