Guide to Install Android Oreo on Honor 9. Experience EMUI 8

Honor 9 stands as another smartphone that can be acquired at a comparatively low price, and it gives strong competition to all the top-notch smartphones of 2016. It costs around €430, and it has everything to make it stand next to high-end smartphones like the OnePlus 9 and Samsung Galaxy S24. Its price is almost the same as that of the S8. Honour 9 has a sleek and stylish design that makes it comfortable to hold and use with one hand only. On the back side, there is a curved glass. It has Gorilla glass three on both sides, and it’s coated with aluminium to match the colour of the glass. Honor 9 features a 5.15-inch IPS LCD screen. It runs on Android 7.0, but you can install Android Oreo on Honor 9 using this guide.

Honor 9 also allows users to customize the phone’s theme using the themes app. It has the same processor as the Huawei P10: a high-end octa-core CPU. Along with that, there is 4 GB of RAM onboard.

There is no update for many countries yet for the latest EMUI 8 for Honor 9. EMUI 8 is AOSP of Android Oreo. Huawei jumped directly from EMUI 5.1 to 8, which is not readily available on all Huawei devices. So, if you can’t wait for the OTA update, you can use this guide to manually install EMUI 8 on Honor 9. This guide might be a little tricky for nontech people who don’t have much experience flashing firmware and custom recovery on their Android Phone.

Step to Step Guide on How to Install Android Oreo on Honor 9:

As I said before, the guide is not easy for professionals who have been doing it for a long time. If you are trying it for the first time, just follow the steps below, and feel free to ask me in the comments if you have any confusion.

Pre-Requisites:

• You can download all the necessary files, i.e. Firmware, TWRP, SuperSU, etc, from here.
• Make sure your fastboot and ADB commands are up and running.

Now let us move on to the guide.

How to Install Android Oreo on Honor 9:

1. Download the firmware from the above link and move L09-B321 firmware files to the root directory of your SD card. Download them and move them to ADB folder.
2. Install the TWRP for Nougat via Fastboot:

   • fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.1.1-nougat-stf.img

3. Boot into recovery menu of your phone and connect it to your PC.
4. Open ADB shell and run the following commands.

dd if=/external_sd/STF_RECOVERY_NoCheck.img of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/recovery_a
dd if=/external_sd/STF_RECOVERY_NoCheck.img of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/recovery2_a
echo --update_package=/sdcard/update.zip > /cache/recovery/command
echo --update_package=/sdcard/update_data_full_public.zip >> /cache/recovery/command
echo --update_package=/sdcard/update_full_STF-L09_hw_normal.zip >> /cache/recovery/command

Lastly, you will have to reboot the recovery again via the TWRP terminal or ADB shell. In order to do so, run the following code:

reboot recovery

Now, the installation will start, and you will boot into Android Oreo on your Huawei Honor 9.

Also Checkout: Fix Google Account Sync on Honor 9.

Update on How to fix missing boot animation after you install Android Oreo on Honor 9:

After flashing the firmware, you might notice some weird things, like the sound not ringing, the theme store not loading, and the boot animation missing at startup. We will fix this issue in this section.

1. Install TWRP for Oreo using the following code:
   • fastboot flashrecovery_ramdisk twrp-3.1.1-oreo-stf.img
2. Open TWRP recovery and flash the SuperSU file provided in the link above.
3. Download any Root file browser (e.g. Root Browser (free) or Root Explorer (paid)).
4. Open the Root File Browser app.
5. In /cust/hw rename “normal” folder to “eu” (without the quotes)
6. In /version/special_cust/STF-L09/hw rename “normal” folder to “eu” (without the quotes)
7. Reboot your Phone.

There are a few more steps that are just recommended, but they are not essential:

1. It is recommended that you do a factory reset and unroot, as the above guide contains some internal software changes.
2. Now install stock ramdisk to ramdisk partition using fastboot:

   • fastboot flash ramdisk RAMDISK.img

3. Flash stock recovery ramdisk using fastboot

   • fastboot flash recovery_ramdisk RECOVERY_RAMDISK.img

4. Boot into Recovery, use the same button combination or ADB commands as you use to get into TWRP.
5. Factory reset your phone.

Das ist alles. Now enjoy using your device on Android Oreo.

I hope the guide was easy and the instructions on how to install Android Oreo on Honor 9 were clear. If you have any issues, questions or confusion regarding the guide above, feel free to contact me using the comments.

The credits of this guide go to Honor Ambassador for XDA. Who developed this method? If you want to roll back, you can see the instructions on his post.