[FP4] FPOS Manual OTA update?

It seems those of us who were gratified with a Fairphone and are subscribers of Orange (France) carrier are cursed with a malediction.

I made a post months ago about unremovable Orange bloatware (Orange App Center, Orange Selector, Deezer by Orange, Orange TV, Orange and me…etc) that would reinstall/reenable iself everytime the phone was rebooted as long as you had an Orange SIM card inserted. There’s even an official statement of Fairphone team saying it CAN’T be removed.

But it can. I ended up debloating my phone the radical way with the help of Magisk and its glorious debloated module.

UNFORTUNATELY, this came with a price: for some reason and Orange debloated Fairphone will not propose the OTA updates (it does if I let the Orange garbage apps live.freely on my device, I’ve been able to verify it).

Of course I refuse to surrender. I will not get bullied with carrier crapware.

Therefore I was wondering if there was a way to proceed to a “manual” software update or flashing the latest version of FPOS (without wiping the whole system of course) ?

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Continuing the conversation here…

If what you are trying to accomplish is installing the OTA on a system that has a Magisk patched boot partition, that won’t work.
The updater checks the hashes for all the partitions, so you’ll have to restore the original boot partition before you can install the update. Believe me I have tried a lot of ways… (But there still might be a way I haven’t thought off, I’m still far from an expert :slightly_smiling_face: )

Why can’t you disable Magisk temporarily and install the update the regular way? :thinking:

That should keep your modules installed just fine, I believe :slightly_smiling_face:

Why don’t you just change your carrier, the cause of your problems?

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That was always the intention of course.
In my situation the OTA is not even popping in system update.

Edit: I see what you mean now, disabling Magisk should restore the bloatware and eventually the OTA should pop…

Because they have the best coverage and download speed/rate. And I never had such forced crapware on other devices !

There have been reports about other devices with orange bloatware too.

For sure, but in my experience this is the first one that I know of that auto-reinstalls bloatware even after a wipe and fresh flash from a constructor OS image.
And I’ve owned 15+ Android devices from the first Samsung Galaxy S times.

I’m gonna continue the conversation here to not spam the other thread.

You can try payload_dumper, that script can create new images by combining factory images and an OTA delta update. I haven’t been able to create trustworthy images with it so far, I wouldn’t try flashing them. They’ll need to match the hashes the system expects…
I’m hoping for payload-dumper-go to get support for it at some point, that one has been much more consistent and stable.

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Hahahaha thanks for the idea but something in the way you formulate it tells me I shouldn’t try that either :grinning:

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With one of those payload_dumper tools (think it was a fork) I did at least manage to apply the last incremental OTA to the stock full OTA to obtain the raw partitions to extract the vendor blobs for LOS.

Not sure if a flashable OTA could be created from it. FP4 also uses a dynamic partitioning scheme. I had to first “extract” the stock super.img into it’s sub partitions to be able to apply the incremental OTA. Not sure how I would re-assemble that afterwards.

Hope that Fairphone will just update the stock offline installer from time to time.

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Yeah, I did get some usable partitions that way as well, but others were just completely broken. Not the best foundation to build upon… :roll_eyes:

I found lpmake through a postmarketOS issue, haven’t tried it yet. A user of this forum is participating in the discussion, so there would be someone to ask once the dumper produces consistent output.

That would probably be the easiest route. I already tried replacing the build number in the download link https://fairphone-android-builds.ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/FP4/FP4.FP3R.A.099.20220112_factory.zip with a newer one, that works for the kernel images, sadly they apparently haven’t uploaded a newer one…

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