SoylentNews

After nearly 6 years with a Motorola Photon Q (XT897/"Asanti") I finally decided it's time for a new phone, and spent the outrageous sum of just-under-$130-including-shipping for a Moto C Plus, screenglass, and rubber body armor.

Motorola, now a subsidiary of Lenovo, is known for most of its phones being fairly amenable to rooting and unlocking. This particular one also happens to be GSM-enabled and support dual SIMs, on the off chance I ever leave the US and want a data plan. Its specs are, by today's standards, unimpressive: quad-core MT6737M CPU (4x ARMv8 A53 @ 28nm, somewhat slower than a Snapdragon 425 for reference), 2 GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC flash, and 5" 1280x720 screen. The body is all plastic, though it's not bad plastic, and the battery is a surprising 4,000 mAh that weighs more than the phone itself does.

Now, it turns out the C Plus is *not* as easily unlockable as, say, the G4 is. In particular, the usual fastboot commands such as get_unlock_data simply fail with "unknown remote command" errors. The stock ROM is also kind of pants, though it's at least a fairly vanilla Android 7.0 rather than Madokami-forgive-us-all MIUI or TouchWiz.

However, there is a program called SP Flash Tool that is able to write directly to MediaTek devices' internal flash over a USB port. This is not for the faint of heart, as it requires carefully-crafted scatter files with the exact starting addresses and lengths corresponding to each and every piece of the stock firmware, and if you mess up by even one byte, you will very likely hard-brick your phone. For even more heart-pounding excitement, the way to get a custom ROM on here is not to use this tool, but to pop into an advanced mode and specify where to start writing (if you're curious, it's 0x2d80000 and no, that's not a typo) and with what file.

The purpose here is to flash a custom build of TeamWin recovery, known by its uncomplimentary acronym TWRP. And *this* involves dissecting the machine, removing its battery, holding VolDown, and hooking it up to a PC via USB cable, *in that order.* Somehow, Flash Tool is able to write to the device even though it's powered off and battery-less.

From here, disconnect from the PC, hold VolUp and Power, and select Recovery boot. After about 30s, TWRP will load, and you can pull up ADB in your shell, place the device in sideload mode, and "adb sideload /path/to/lineageos-14.1.zip," which goes a hell of a lot faster than you'd expect it to. But there's a catch: if you reboot now, you'll go into an endless bootloop, where the phone won't go past the Motorola logo. If you don't have a stock ROM or, preferably, a Nandroid backup, this is game over.

Turns out you *also* need to install SuperSU, and you need to do it in a special way: while in TWRP, pop a terminal, and do "echo SYSTEMLESS=true>/data/.supersu" before adb-sideloading a known-good SuperSU .zip onto the phone. The output will be quite verbose, and it will warn you that 1) on reboot, the device will likely restart at least once and 2) first boot will take "several minutes."

They're not kidding. I lost count of the exact amount of time, but I believe LineageOS sat there blowing bubbles to itself for a good 15 or 20 minutes, and I was literally seconds away from forcing a power-down and starting the entire process again with a stock ROM. It also takes well over a minute to boot; I counted 33 sets of right-to-left bubbles at the LineageOS loading screen per bootup, and that's after a good 30 seconds of the phone sitting at the Motorola logo with a nice fat warning about how the device can't be verified and might not work properly.

Yeah, that's the point: from Google's PoV, it's *not* working properly, because LineageOS seems not to have all that spying junk on it. I didn't even flash a GApps zip; instead, first thing I did was to sideload an FDroid archive, which is something like an open source version of the Play Store. Everything I need is on there and more.

So far, I am loving this thing. I've been zipping all over downtown Milwaukee looking for a new place to lease the last couple of days, and there is nothing like having a portable MP3 player for those long rides. And get this: after using it to play music for a good 3 hours, *the battery was still at 95% from a full charge this morning.* That is *nuts.* The Moto C Plus punches way, way above its weight with the proper love and attention paid to it.

So if anyone wants a good budget phone to run LineageOS, Resurrection Remix, etc on and doesn't mind doing some nailbitingly-scary stuff with direct flashing, I can heartily recommend the C Plus (NOT the C, that thing is junk). Happy flashing, everyone :)