[General Questions and Answers] Marotte:
Hi,

Although I passed my 40 I just bought my first smartphone a few week ago. It’s a Doogee S96Pro. As somebody who like to understand how it works, I already learn a few thing on the Android ecosystem.

I’ve been able to activate the developer mode and to use adb to uninstall some apps. I also managed to boot in fastboot mode to unlock the phone.

My first attempt at flashing was a fail, the phone was rebooting in a loop, indicating "Red state". I guess I should have never "fastboot flash boot/recovery foo.img" if "fastboot boot foo.img" didn’t work? What’s your opinion on this?

The Doogee support sent me a link to the files for my phone. In fact someone on this forum has had already posted it. The two archives are named :

S9S88A7.DGE.DOOGEE.EEA.HB.HJ.AYYDVFAZ.1130.V3.02.zip

S9S88A7.DGE.DOOGEE.HB.HJ.AYYDVFAZ.1203.V3.04.zip

To make the phone boot again I flashed the boot partition with the boot.img file I found in the second archive. If I understood what I read, the file with "EEA" in it’s name is the "European version" while the other one is the "Global version".

Although I flashed with the boot.img that was in S9S88A7.DGE.DOOGEE.HB.HJ.AYYDVFAZ.1203.V3.04.zip, if I go to the update info (About the phone > Update), I can see the string S9S88A7.DGE.DOOGEE.EEA.HB.HJ.AYYDVFAZ.0128.V3.03_20210128-1612. I don’t understand why this difference (v3.03 vs. v3.04).

Then I used the Magisk Manager to patch this boot.img file and flash it again. I now have root access on the phone which is nice.

Now the questions!

When booting the phone says: “Orange state, your phone’s unlocked”, then it boots normally. What’s the implication of this? I’m not sure but I think I tried to lock it again (fastboot flashing lock) but the message remains. Does it sound possible to you? I should check again this point…

In the Magisk Manager I also tried the "SafetyNet" check, which is refused. Is it OK? What does it imply? Why would I need to pass this SafetyNet test for?

I’m not sure I understood how the recovery thing works… I understand it’s another partition than "boot", and I know I can boot on it using the boot menu (pressing volume up when turning on the phone). What I don’t know is if it starts a recovering of the system automatically when booting on this partition (then erasing all data on the phone), or not.

Let’s say I flash the boot.img on the recovery partition (fastboot flash recovery boot.img). If I do a normal boot it should boot as usual, but if I boot on recovery it would boot on a virgin system. Am I right? Let says I configure nothing and reboot again, a normal boot this time. I then should get back to my usual, already configured system, as the "boot" partition hasn’t been modified. Is this also right?

Before doing anymore tests I would like to be able to backup an image with the phone already configured, with data and root access and applications. One (or maybe two or three?) file I can keep on my computer, and in case I break the boot on the phone, I could just fastboot flash boot my_custom_image.img to recover my phone configured. Oy maybe also flashing a "userdata" partition? Would I need some other partition? Is it more complicated than that?

It seems I have to identify the right partition(s) and carefully use dd to dump the partition to an image file… Before trying to do so I’d like to have some advice, hence this post!

Also. I read about a software called TWPR. Should I use it, and why ? I understand it’s a system aimed to be flashed on the recovery partition, is it right? What’s its use?

Finally I read about LineageOS which is the ultimate customization for the phone, it’s a “pure” Android, which is totally opensource (but it has to uses a lot of proprietary blob for devices AFAIK). I don’t think I’ll get there anyway. If I’m not mistaken it’s hard to do, especially with new phones nobody has ran LineageOS on, and there is something like no probability all the devices would work anyway.

Have a nice day.