[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] lotus118:
Hi,

I've now spent quite a few frustrating hours trying to root my Alcatel 1c (model 5003D, running Android 8.1 Go) and nothing seems to work. A short overview of some of the rabbit holes I've gone down:

Root tools

Started with the obvious: root tools. In short, none that I ran work. There's a couple I haven't tried because the instructions were mostly in Russian and some googling turned up quite a few mentions of them containing malware, but other than that I've pretty much tried all the major ones.

Flashing images via fastboot

Naturally, the next place I turned was the awesome resource that is this forum. This thread gave me plenty of hope, but I was soon flummoxed by my device's fastboot mode for which a bunch of the normal features are either broken or are simply not implemented. Some examples of things that should work (and indeed work on other Alcatel phones, notably, it seems, ones that are not based on Spreadtrum) but didn't:

~/D/platform-tools > ./fastboot oem unlock
FAILED (remote: 'unknown cmd.')
fastboot: error: Command failed

~/D/platform-tools > ./fastboot oem unlock-go
FAILED (remote: 'unknown cmd.')
fastboot: error: Command failed

~/D/platform-tools > ./fastboot oem unlock-go --wipe
FAILED (remote: 'unknown cmd.')
fastboot: error: Command failed

~/D/platform-tools > ./fastboot flashing unlock
FAILED (remote: 'Not implemet.')
fastboot: error: Command failed

(note the spelling error in the error message...)

~/D/platform-tools > ./fastboot flash recovery ../recovery.img
Sending 'recovery' (28266 KB) OKAY [ 1.582s]
Writing 'recovery' FAILED (remote: 'Flashing Lock Flag is locked. Please unlock it first!')
fastboot: error: Command failed

That last one was particularly intriguing, as it suggests there is a Flashing Lock Flag that can be unlocked. I tried all of the fastboot commands that seemed relevant but couldn't find any way of setting that flag or even figuring out if it actually exists. I even rand the boot.img through strings to see if I could find something interesting, but didn't turn up anything.

Just to be clear, before doing all this I set the phone to Developer Mode and checked the "OEM unlocking" feature.

Flashing tools

I tried various tools with which it's possible to flash phones. A lot of them use fastboot under the covers which doesn't work (see above). Some of them don't but didn't work on my phone all the same, for various reasons:

SPD flash tool - After yet more Googling I stumbled upon the SPD flash tool,built specifically to flash Spreadtrum-based devices. I downloaded the latest version, installed all of the necessary USB drivers and tried to flash the phone with the stock ROM. No dice. The tool fails to connect to the device via the USB2Serial thing that it uses to communicate. No idea what's going on or why it won't work, and haven't yet mustered the courage to dive into the source code. Of course, if I do get it to work, then I have to figure out how to actually root the device using this tool. I'm guessing it will involve unpacking the ROM (a PAC file), modifying the recovery.img to a TWRP (or similar), repacking it and flashing the result. I've only managed the unpacking so far, no clue as to the other 2 steps. BTW, the SPD flash tool site als has a "factory" and a "research" tool, besides the "upgrade" tool that I tried. Unless I'm missing something, all three seem to be exactly the same (save for the color scheme).

Alcatel Mobile Upgrade S - Installs just fine and then allows you to choose your phone out of a dropdown... that doesn't include my model.

Sugar MTK/QCT - Installed it and the necessary drivers but it can't find my phone, no matter what I try. Also, I keep reading that it needs login credentials (wut?)

Conclusion: argh!

So, nothing so far. Since it's a Spreadtrum phone it has an engineering mode that can be explored with an APK I found in this thread. Nothing in the settings it reveals appears to be of any help though. I also contacted the makers of the AIO Alcatel toolkit to see if they had any ideas, but after I explained the situation one of them concluded "Hmmm. New one on me". Needless to say I also tried searching this forum for more tips, but googling 'site:xdaforums.com "5003D"' returns no hits.

For now, I'm forced to conclude that there is a lot of really awesome tooling out there created by some very talented people, but none of it works on my phone. As of yet the 5003D appears pretty unrootable. If anyone has any tips to help me along or point me in the right direction, I would be very appreciative.