Dude, you just saved my phone! Thanks a lot!
I guess I’ll just stick to rooted stock for the moment, waiting for the guys around here to successfully boot a GSI
I guess I should reupload the large images as sparse images, so you don’t have to specify the “-S” flag.
Also it’s probably safer not just flashing all the partitions (including the sbl1 and aboot) to both slots.
This could brick your device for good if something goes wrong during flashing, since there is no firehose programmer available for EDL-mode.
It would have probably been enough to flash just system (possibly also boot, vendor and vbmeta)
If you want to, only the system image is too big. Actually I did slot a then slot b.
Actually it is important to flash all partitions because he might have (As I had) an other version of the other partitions
That’s true, but I don’t think flashing sbl1 and aboot is really necessary.
And since that is what is needed to have fastboot it’s probably safer to first try flashing without these.
Since this slot A/B stuff is a bit alien when coming from the Fairphone 2 …
Do I get this right that I can keep the now installed TWRP and OTA updates of the stock OS would still work because the recovery is not involved anymore in the updating process?
I believe that the A/B partitions are alternated between updates so that the user doesnt have to wait for there phone to update. When you update it applies the update to the partition that is not in use, then after reboot you get switched to the partition that wasnt in use, for example B but now is, and now partition A is used for the next update and it cycles back and fourth.
On the Fairphone 2, when performing an automatic update instead of a manual one, update files were simply downloaded to a certain directory, then the phone got rebooted, and then the recovery took over and installed the update before rebooting into the updated OS.
Regarding the A/B mechanism (which is now used on the Fairphone 3), the guide doesn’t exactly say how the slots are switched to then boot the other slot which got updated in the background.
But my guess now is the recovery would have no role in this anymore, so keeping the installed TWRP shouldn’t break automatic updates of the stock OS. Or should it?
Well, if in doubt, I’ll just see when the next update comes around.
I think technically you could have two different systems running on the same phone that share the same data partition, it would probably break updates (or one partition would get overwritten.) This also means you could have a combo of rooted and unrooted, as long as they were both running the same systems. (I could be totally wrong though.)
If I understand correctly, TWRP (and Magisk) are gone after the OTA update, and need to be re-installed:
The key thing here is that it [the OTA update] installs a fresh, fully stock version. Your data gets pulled over, but none of your mods go with it. To get them back, you have to install them all again. There are various ways of doing this, and this isn’t the place to repeat the guides that are already posted on how. Just understand that you have to do it to keep root, twrp, and your other mods.