[Update: Now available] Realme 2 Pro official TWRP release imminent

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Realme, an offshoot of OPPO, quickly gained mainstream interest since it’s arrival. They have been separated from OPPO to operate as an independent entity and will be headed by Sky Li, former Global VP at OPPO.

Interestingly Realme’s target users are not limited to value-for-money midrange users. The brand considers the modding community seriously from the beginning, as their primary rival Xiaomi does.

Realme CEO Madhav Sheth announced last year about the company’s plan to unlock the bootloaders and publish the kernel sources, which are the mandatory prerequisites of smooth aftermarket developments.

On January 15, Realme unveiled their bootloader unlocking facility (limited to Realme 2 Pro for now). They adopted a model similar to Motorola or Xiaomi, where interested users need to sign up for the procedure first.

After manual verification (which can be a week long), a special OTA update will be provided that will allow running “in-depth test” via another app. If all checks are passed, then the phone can be unlocked via fastboot by the generic command:

fastboot flashing unlock

While the procedure looks unnecessarily lengthy and complicated, we have speculated possible reasons. Realme still uses OPPO’s ColorOS, and the two companies likely share the same software development team.

In past, OPPO started “Project Spectrum” to provide close to stock alternative OS for select handsets. They provided engineering bootloader as a part of the initiative, which could be used to replace the standard bootloader from factory and unlocked easily by standard fastboot commands.

Unfortunately Project Spectrum was abandoned without any apparent reasons. But looking at the similarities, it can be said that Realme’s open source initiative is nothing but the successor of OPPO’s Project Spectrum.

On the other hand, Realme did publish an incomplete device tree for 2 Pro. The promised full kernel source is delayed though.

Kernel source code will be released after some time(maybe several weeks).

But this is enough for developers to come up with custom recovery like TWRP. XDA member SamarV-121 came up with minimal device tree required for compiling TWRP and we have spotted number of unofficial TWRP builds in XDA’s Realme 2 Pro sub-forum, including one from SamarV-121 himself.

Looking inside the official TWRP codebase, we can also find evidences (example: here, here, here) that surely indicate the imminent release of official TWRP for Realme 2 Pro (codename: rmx1801).

The current version of TWRP can not decrypt stock encrypted /data partition, so formatting it is a must. We hope the issue will be settled in future revisions.

Are you planning to grab a Realme 2 Pro solely for tinkering with it? Let us know.

Update

We have checked TWRP download portal and the relevant page is now live! Click here to download official TWRP for Realme 2 Pro.

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