[Hisense a9] Root - Reward Offered (Snapdragon 662) - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

The Hisense a9 is an e-ink 4g smartphone that I want to use as my own Frankenstein light phone.
I would like to root mine and use this custom launcher to create a minimalist phone that isn't quite as useless as the Light Phone concept (i.e bigger screen, some web browsing, play store, etc).
I've dug around and so far it looks like everyone who has tried has hit a dead end.
I will come right out and say I am an absolute vanilla dumb dumb noobie noob who cannot write a single line of code. I'm just a simple man who wants this simple phone to run vanilla android and not have the CCP peeping around in my business.
To the FIRST person to successfully gain root access to this phone, I will reward you with .25 ETH. You can respond here or email me at [email protected].
Yes, I have 2accounts installed. Yes I managed to install some GAPPS. I am not interested in any compromises. Get China away from this phone and give me exactly what I listed above, the ether is yours.
Admins, please advise if this violates any community rules. Thanks!

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I'm one of the people who was trying to root my Hisense A9, and as OP rightly said I hit dead ends. I'll also add 0.25ETH or another coin / fiat of the same value for this phone to get rooted. It would be such a great phone if it was rooted!

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I like minimal launchers too. Here's my custom one.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}

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RunnyYolk said:
I'm one of the people who was trying to root my Hisense A9, and as OP rightly said I hit dead ends. I'll also add 0.25ETH or another coin / fiat of the same value for this phone to get rooted. It would be such a great phone if it was rooted!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Amazing! That gets us up to .5 ETH. If there is anyone else who wants to contribute to the "bounty" it would definitely be worth a more skilled dev's time to crack this case.
I know there is a big fringe group of eink phone lovers who want to see this happen!
@RunnyYolk any idea if there's a platform we can post the reward on to guarantee it to the winner? I'll gladly contribute upfront.
One last thought: is it unheard of to find a hardware solution for something like this? Swapping out the board or something? Sorry, I'm really shooting from the hip here.

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That A9 costs a chunk of money. I was thinking of the A5 which is not too expensive.
Is the A5 rooted already?
Anybody got an A9 with a somewhat/totally broken screen that they want to sell cheap?

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Bumping this thread .

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Thanks for the bump - just checking in to say my reward still stands. @a9project , I don't know if there's any reward / bounty platform we can use - good idea though so that people know the reward is set. Open to suggestions.

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Just commenting to show there's another person eager to see this phone rooted.

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Hello guys,
I have a disease called visual snow and light emitting screens are considered one of the reasons of this disease. So i may really need this phone but without the root it really doesn't meet my needs.
If i had the money i would really donate more. Thank you donators , you may save some vision if this happens.

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I also have the a9, and I'm joining the bounty with @a9project and @RunnyYolk, adding my 0.25 eth share.

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If SecureBoot is enabled you'll need a HiSense signed Firehose loader to get EDL working.
Looking around, I see that HiSense makes an effort on their MediaTek devices to have a secure boot.
So, I'd presume that the A9 has SecureBoot enabled.
If someone found the UART on this, you could see it say whether that is true or not.
If it didn't have SecureBoot we might be able to dig up a loader for this.
The attempts to get EDL working that I've seen listed don't seem to be very coherent.
The only other solution is an exploit. I'm no good at that.

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Renate said:
If SecureBoot is enabled you'll need a HiSense signed Firehose loader to get EDL working.
Looking around, I see that HiSense makes an effort on their MediaTek devices to have a secure boot.
So, I'd presume that the A9 has SecureBoot enabled.
If someone found the UART on this, you could see it say whether that is true or not.
If it didn't have SecureBoot we might be able to dig up a loader for this.
The attempts to get EDL working that I've seen listed don't seem to be very coherent.
The only other solution is an exploit. I'm no good at that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had a go at getting EDL to work (might have been my attempts you saw), but I don't know what I'm doing really. I'm a software developer, but nothing to do with Android / system stuff so I'm pretty lost. I opened a couple of issues on EDL GH, but the main one was closed off by the developer:
github.com/bkerler/edl/issues/300
github.com/bkerler/edl/issues/303
Is the only way of getting a signed Firehose loader to wait for Hisense to release it / leak it?

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Bot
RunnyYolk said:
Is the only way of getting a signed Firehose loader to wait for Hisense to release it / leak it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pretty much.
Did you try in fastboot?
Code:
C:\>fastboot getvar all
Does it say secure=1?

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Renate said:
Bot
Pretty much.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hm, thanks a shame.
Renate said:
Code:
C:\>fastboot getvar all
Does it say secure=1?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah it has `secure:yes`. This sounds like the SecureBoot you mentioned above, so I'm assuming that's not good news. Here are a couple of outputs for `fastboot getvar all` that I found in another thread:
pastebin.com/d2bjas8e
pastebin.com/1afywunu
One of these pastebins is from resetting the phone into fastboot mode, and the other is from rebooting from fastboot into the bootloader.

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For anyone using the 2accounts or F1 workaround, I installed GBox yesterday and it's easily the best workaround for now: https://www.gboxlab.com/ - it's still a virtual environment, but it loads apps quickly and seems to pass notifications through more reliably. It also does things like letting apps automatically ready SMS auth codes, which never worked for me with 2accounts or F1. I can't get Google Assistant working still, but everything else I've tried works beautifully. I think this is as close to a native experience as we'll get until the phone is rooted.

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I'm also very interested in having the a9 rooted.
I will add 0.25ETH to the bounty started by @a9project , @sphink and @RunnyYolk

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I saw a method to extract boot.img on the Hisense forum.
Although it is for a7cc, it should be a general method.
But they said that it seems that the bootloader still needs to be unlocked.
Maybe a9 can have an unlock method,Because the processor he uses is Qualcomm Snapdragon 662.
A7、A7cc的boot.img文件提取方法-海信智能手机 - 手机版 - Powered by Discuz!
Wish you success.

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Renate said:
Bot
Pretty much.
Did you try in fastboot?
Code:
C:\>fastboot getvar all
Does it say secure=1?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
trying to root my A9 as well.
I ran the command you suggested.
result is secure:yes

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RunnyYolk said:
Hm, thanks a shame.
Yeah it has `secure:yes`. This sounds like the SecureBoot you mentioned above, so I'm assuming that's not good news. Here are a couple of outputs for `fastboot getvar all` that I found in another thread:
pastebin.com/d2bjas8e
pastebin.com/1afywunu
One of these pastebins is from resetting the phone into fastboot mode, and the other is from rebooting from fastboot into the bootloader.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey, I'm trying to root my A9 as well.
I believe we are at the same stage with process.
Do you mind sharing your exact steps, so I can try to reproduce your results?
Thanks!

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I read through the fans.hisense website. There are users who are asking for a A9 img. Because of the lack of SD card, the Hisense support said that only online updates are permitted. However, the support also said that the user should contact customer service and they might help them.
Sorry for the lack of links I found this info last year before I knew about this thread.
If someone can contact hisense support and ask for the img they might supply it. I have no idea how to do this thou. For the A7 they frequently post all img files on their forum. So I doubt they care if A9 img gets out.