While I usually don’t condone proprietary software or hardware, I have to give a thumbs up to the One UI/Samsung devs.
I was “playing around” with my Samsung S23 - which by the way I have debloated to the point of it feeling snappier than all the bleeding edge iPhones - I “accidentally” messed up my recovery partition. Here comes the thumbs up part.
Instead of falling into a bootloop or becoming bricked in any way, some sort of failsafe mechanism kicked in, sending the user (me) to the download mode. So instead of leaving me with a brick containing all my music, contacts, banking stuff and, well, my everyday life, it allowed me to reflash a working recovery partition, albeit not the official one but TWRP since I - in my panicked state - could not find an image of just the Samsung recovery (I would have had to reflash all of Android…).
WELL DONE programming it so that it takes you to download mode! :D
PS: If you’re going to experiment, don’t do it on your daily driver. Don’t be like me.
EDL (Emergency DownLoad) mode on Qualcomm chips, I’m sure other chipsets have a similar mode. The chipset actually does it, the hardware manufacturer just has to support it.
It is a pretty cool fallback mode.
Mediatek has a mode similar to Qualcomm’s implementation. Rooting my Wyze robot vacuum required it.
Isn’t that part of stock Android?
Is it? I just assumed it was Samsung, since the download mode was displaying an error saying something like “failed to verify Samsung recovery checksum” as if it was expecting a Samsung image.
Yeah, going as far back as my Nexus 4, I soft-locked that thing maybe half a dozen times. The download and bootloader modes are traditionally supposed to act like a computer BIOS so you’re never left without the ability to flash a new OS. Unfortunately a lot of manufacturers have locked down the OS a ton and don’t let you easily get into these modes anymore. I’m honestly surprised Samsung didn’t lock this down, although I suspect it only accepts signed packages for flashing.
Sweet! This taught me some about those modes. Do they perhaps also reside on their very own eeproms or similar chips so that they are not easily erasable?
That’s just Samsung’s version of “recovery mode”. Pretty much every Android device operates this way.
Good to know that I can mess up other devices than Samsung’s too xD
Once in a while you encounter software that, while proprietary, proves that even if you’re doing closed source software, you don’t have to be an asshole about it.
I don’t remember which hardware I was mucking about with, but when trying to do something with the firmware that I wasn’t supposed to do, I was given a warning, a recommendation to back up everything, and a simple pointer on what to do if whatever insanity I was doing didn’t work.