HTC 10 S-OFFed with Sunshine
If you’ve got a reason to need S-OFF on your phones, it’s available now for all carriers of the HTC 10 with the Sunshine S-OFF tool.
I should probably preface here that most rooters don’t actually need S-OFF (unless something changed in the last weeks). For most it just prevents you from having to make a couple of extra time consuming steps when newer radio firmware is eventually released. There are some other useful bits for it (mostly developer options and jumping carriers,) and there’s always the potential that the next Android or firmware might make it a highly valuable quantity to the end users, but who knows.
If you want it, it’s here, it works, and as with previous version of Sunshine it costs $25 to purchase a licence per phone. So don’t lose that phone.
Here are the official instructions on how to use Sunshine (take careful note of installing the modified SuperSU, don’t be me).
To S-OFF with Sunshine you use either a stock rooted ROM or ViperROM. I’d suggest going the ViperROM option unless you want to hunt down a modified SuperSU and flash it. Using the latest official SuperSU managed to get me in a boot loop to the point where I just ended up flashing a new ROM to get out of it.
Should be noted, they have extremely good instructions on not doing that, I’m just on a lot of medication and skipped the fact that I needed a SuperSU that someone else had modified.
After your device becomes S-OFFed the user partition is now unreadable due to the way HTC does encryption these days. You’ll be prompted for a password you never set up. A quick reboot into recovery, format the user partition, and you’re good to go.
How I did it from an unsupported ROM
After my first failure on stock using the wrong SuperSU I’d flashed Bad Boyz ROM. It was what I’d become happy with on the M9, wanted to see if it was any good on the HTC 10. It is as far as I could tell.
I went ahead and tried Sunshine from there, but was informed the ROM was incompatible. Flashed the modified SuperSU, still no dice.
I made a TB and nandroid of the ROM to my ext-sd card (unadopted, which was probably good as my assumption was if storage were adopted I would lose the data the instant the encryption keys changed,) downloaded and dirty-flashed Viper (which worked perfectly over BB) and ran Sunshine.
A couple of minutes later Sunshine said it was having network issues. I checked and yes, our router was on the fritz. Oh well, just turned off the WiFi and let it LTE and all was good. System rebooted, had an uncomfortable several minutes staring at a boot screen, and then I was prompted to enter the password to decrypt my userdata partition.
I rebooted into recovery, formatted the data partition in Team Win’s Recovery (takes about 40 seconds if I remember correctly,) and then went to restore my BB ROM.
BB ROM restored, took an inordinate amount of time to boot up after nandroid recovery, but when it did everything was there, subsequent reboots were normal. All was good with the phone.
Is it worth it?
All going to depend on your use. Are you a developer? Do you do weird things with kernels in Android mode? Do you have a particular reason you want S-OFF other than that your favorite ROM mentions that it’s recommended so you don’t have to jump through an extra hoop? Want to pay $25 to save yourself a couple of hours of waiting on a phone to do something?
With the amount of flashing I used to (radios, old firmware, kernels, other carrier’s stuff, S-OFF only tricks) it’s always been something I appreciated. I didn’t really use it as much on the M9 but my M8 I sure did.
The tool itself works and works exactly as it says it will. You buy it, follow the instructions, you’re going to be S-OFF.
Their chat support system meant we could figure out what I did wrong pretty quickly.
I’m a fan.
