I got an LG V20 (LS997)! Help me crack it

For those wondering, I was working on a custom rom for my LS970 but that seems to have become… More difficult. Also the LG V30 is coming out soon so the V20 was on super sale! 270! Worth it.

So, new phone. Android. Still learning all the new android kinks. Problem is all the apps on my phone are basically sprint bloatware. I don’t think I want to jump to lineage /just/ yet, but I defininitely want my phone rootd so I can burn off the bloatware. Problem is that it seems that any guides that were on XDA seem to be gone and I don’t really trust anything else… Though thats just my paranoia. I have found stuff on youtube, not a problem, but I’m still wary. Does anyone else have a V20 and have you rooted it? What resources have you used?

Thanks!

Actually it appears I have completely separate issues. I can’t open the device over USB. WTF LG?

Unlock your lockscreen and then plug the cable.

lol No it seems to be a driver issue of some sort. Not many good answers aroudn though.

I know my S3 wont pop up as connected unless its unlocked.Weird issue you got there. Also yt videos for rooting are fine,some root apps have come a long way.Like 1 click way.

Yeeeaaaahhhhh… I saw that and it seems super sketch to me.

Here ya go


I don’t think this works if you’ve updated your firmware though. Your phone might have shipped with it already updated.

In case you didn’t already go ahead and root in the past month:

I trust XDA to not be spyware, but jesus christ it was a nightmare unlocking my vs995. At one point, you’re supposed to boot back into the OS, but my phone got stuck at the vendor boot screen. A few days of fastboot later I was finally able to get a working rom flashed (wouldn’t have taken that long if I knew what I was doing). I now know that the very first time it boots up to a new rom, the vendor boot screen may take over half an hour. It’s not stuck. Go make a sandwich or something. (This might just be a verizon thing anyway). I also updated to a beta/early version of TWRP as part of troubleshooting, may have helped, may not have. Not messing with it now.

Root for the ls997 is a little different in some steps, idk if it’s more or less reliable than the other phones. There is a typo in step3.sh: boott.img is definitely supposed to be boot1.img. Correct that before you get started.

With regard to Lineage: still a long way to go imo. Second screen is not used (BUT they just figured it out so AOSP support may be coming soon), quad DAC can’t be toggled (I think it’s on all the time but it’s hard to know), MTP corrupts everything and is slow af (might just be me, adb will still do ya), flickering black rectangles everywhere without disable HW overlays (fine once on, but turns off every restart; can’t use battery saver this way), auto exposure in camera app is broken (turn the shutter speed slower than 1/4000 if you want to take non-100%-black photos, can’t record video(!) but the auto-exposure works in video mode and you can take stills while shooting video so…also all 3 cameras work but only in the stock app ofc), and I had problems with the first ~half-second of my music being cut off in stock music and blackplayer (from cold play and between tracks, really ruins it imo; foobar is fine however). So yeah we’re roughing it but no spyware or bloat right? Also blueborne/krack patches so there are benifits.

I love all the hardware gimmicks but I honestly wish I had just bought a used S7 edge and rooted it. Cheaper much better development attention, and less weird hardware to support in Lineage. Then again, if Lineage supported everything perfectly it would be godlike.

Yeah my phone is on the Z6 firmware, not Z5 or 4 like the guide wants which is a bummer. I can get in the recovery mode though, and if I can find the devkit I’ll either create a kernel exploit (my phone is on 4.4 so I could do dirty cow based out of a container or something) or I’ll just hack through the bootloader to ring 1 or 2 and work down from there.

Best of luck, let us know how it goes.

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