[Huawei P20 Lite Questions & Answers] pmatj:
Hi,

last week I bought myself a Huawei P20 Lite as this one seems to be good comprise between size, speed and price and all together I find this device quite nice.

However I'm not a big fan of this ROMs, it's bloated and you have to confirm on each and everyhting, so I tried to reduce this dramatically and I began a long journey....

Unlock the bootloader

When I bought the device I wasn't aware about the issues that I may face (Downgrad, additional 4 Euro to spend) but OK, I thought it would be worth....

Installing Recovery

..but I couldn't be more wrong. It seems that there's no working TWRP for this device out there. I tried a lot, both on 8.0 and 9.1 but each time I tried to

wipe cache/dalvik the whole system got stucked and wasn't able to show the boot animation. So, assuming that there's really no working recovery out there, I continued to

directly flash different ROMs and try out my luck.

Rooting

This wasn't as hard as I though first, at least, as long as the ROM I've used had an advanced Reboot-Menu with the possibilty to boot to recovery, otherwise you end up somewhere in the desert and

may not be able to restart with boot.

The problem is, that this device required to patch the RECOVERY_RAMDISK partition, so in order to have Magisk booted, you required to use the Recovery. No big deal: just Power up

using VolUp and Power until the Huawei logo appears... normally.. It didnt work in more than 50% of the times...

Gapps (or Magisk)

OK, as I already indicated, I tried lots of them, but to be honest, none of them really convinced me (all was done on EMUI9.1 "AB" and not EMUI8 "A only")

GSI Phh Treble: nice, but this is one of thinks I did not checked in depth, as almost all (?) are based on this one...

OmniRom from OpenKirin: works perfectly out of the box, SafeteNet is working, Magisk can be installed, but no advanced boot menu and I find it a little bit overloaded...

MicroG ufOffical: I would go with it, everyhting worked, it's slim BUT I couldn't get my Banking-App working, not even after appliying multiple MagiskHide Prop-Settings...

Descendant: This one was by far my favorite... Really slim, advanced reboot-menu, but I couldn't flash Gapps. OK, so I tried MicroG: this can be installed using Magisk. After some trouble (e.g. you have to install DroidGuardHelper so that the OS recognizes an "Update") I got MicroG working, but I coulnd't get it with my Banking-App. In this ROM I couldn't even apply any MagiskProp Hide-Settings. Only Post-FS worked. OK, as I'Ve failed using this approach, I thought: maybe I can use Gapps with this image.... but as I stated at the beginning: I do not have any working Recovery.

So my questions:

Is there any working Recovery out there? TWRP 3.3.x supports to be flashed in RECOVERY_RAMDISK (and there's also offical support for P20 Pro) As of now I wouldn't even care about decrypted data, but at least be able to wipe and do a factory reset....

Or: Is it possible to install Gapps from a running (rooted) system?

Or: can I patch system.img with Gapps before flashing it to the phone?

But perfectly: did anyone get Descendant running with MagiskHideProp? Maybe even got MicroG running on it?

I'm currently out of ideas, did someone else had such a trouble with that device?

Best regards,

Peter