[LG G8 Guides, News, & Discussion] mangojain:
The background to this story is that i first bought an unlocked G8 back in Dec '20, and found to my dismay that VoLTE and VoWiFi wouldn't work on it in India. It took months of research before i finally figured out the perfect solution, one that involved modifying files in prod/OP and also replacing some files in prod/OP/config with files from the Indian LG G8S. After ensuring that both the Vo's work fine on all the 3 carriers (Jio, Airtel and Vi), one can flash back the original boot file, to get a phone which works as well on Indian networks as the 8S and does not have rooting issues with apps such as Outlook and Teams. No NT Error msg on start up either, if you edit the cust path mapping file correctly.

Coming to now, since i had sold both the G8's that i had modified earlier, i was attracted to an eBay offer for Verizon locked over-stock G8s at $113.95 (plus ~ $20 for overseas shipping). At this low price, i decided to try my luck and ordered one . . .

The factors at play were -

1. How much would the customs duty work out to

2. What would be the overall condition of the phone (rated as 8/10 by the seller)

3. How would i manage the Verizon network lock issue, and finally

4. Would it allow unlocking of the bootloader (a factor i completely forgot to take into consideration, and a point which i never came across in any forum or post)

So, the phone reached me in a record time of 10 days (would have been 9 if the Good Friday holiday hadn't taken away a day) and i started getting the answers :)

1. Great luck with customs, no duty charged

2. Phone condition was definitely refurbished, not open stock as claimed. looked like a screen replacement job, very poor score to the seller

3. Put in a sim and held my breath, error msg popped up and i was considering my options, when i noticed after around 15 mins that the sim lock had been removed by Verizon automatically, with no action required

4. On to the part about unlocking the bootloader, flashing the Canadian Open rom on it and modifying the settings to make it work in India . . . and this is where i got the shock, no OEM unlock option in Developer settings! Don't know why i didn't foresee it, seeing that i am suffering from the same issue on my Verizon Pixel 5 :-(

But, a happy ending to the story . . .

1. I cross-flashed the CA Open anyway and that brought back the oem unlock option

2. Another shock, when i went to unlock the bootloader i found that the fastboot command wouldn't work. Took me 2 days of researching and i had almost given up, when i found the solution on my own, i had to install Verizon-specific adb drivers before fastboot started working

3. In between, the Qualcomm QDLoader driver started to malfunction, so QFIL stopped working and i had to a clean reinstall of Windows on my laptop before i could get all the drivers installed correctly.

All-in-all, 3 days of hard work, but at the end of it i have a perfectly working G8, which cost only ~ $135 and is in decent condition (battery and screen are fine, a few scratches on the body). I really like the G8 for its size, weight and looks, plus the great screen resolution and sound quality.