Hello guys,

I decided to splurge and stay up all night to compile TWRP for the ZTE Cymbal T. I have no idea whether it will actually work or not, but here (GitHub) is my device tree so far.

I was able to make a recovery image, but now I'm kinda stuck. eMMC write protection (includes /system partition, /recovery, etc.) is enabled by default on the Cymbal T, and (thus, I presume) I have only been able to get temporary root with Kingo. I read somewhere about it being a "cache" root, which makes a bit of sense, but I still don't quite understand...

Anyway, I need to find a way to get this flashed... I've tried a Play Store app to flash the image, but it fails, and it seems to use DD. When I disable write protection by using this command in a Terminal emulator (with temp root): reboot disemmcwp, it seems that Kingo cannot root the device, as opposed to when WP is enabled... Then again, Kingo tends to fail sometimes with WP enabled anyway (finicky, I guess?), so I'll test it with WP disabled again, and report back...

Has anybody had to work around this with LG devices, or anything? I've only heard of this being a ZTE thing.

hmm... I guess I'll have to look beyond form factor then xD. I don't know whether ZTE makes any other Android flip phones, or any other manufacturer, really (except Samsung, I guess).

Lollipop doesn't look too promising for perm root... Anything for kernel version 3.10.49 (November 2016)?

Man, ZTE did well on their part... I've read about people somehow being able to flash TWRP + CM11 on their ZTE phones and then disable write protection, and others who did it the other way around. I just got an unlucky combination, ehh? Lollipop and write protection.

I have the kernel source, but I'm not quite sure what to do with it... If I were to mod the kernel, wouldn't I need a special key to sign its .zip in order to flash, given that the stock recovery actually works?