Unofficial CyanogenMod 13 Lands on the Honor 8

Honor’s partnership with us at XDA gave rise to a lot of hope. While Honor has been making affordable and yet appealing hardware for a while, the thought of running Honor’s custom skin often turned away tinkerers. Forum dwellers seeked ways to get the AOSP experience on such capable hardware, and a partnership like this was the perfect opportunity to turn around developer perception of Honor devices with regards their general tinkerability.

For Honor 8 owners, this partnership has brought about good news in the form of CyanogenMod 13. While not the absolute bleeding edge in terms of Android versions as CM13 is based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, this does bring the AOSP experience to the device, allowing users the choice to run an alternative to Honor’s EMUI skin.

The ROM is maintained by XDA Recognized Contributor surdu_petru. The ROM is a Work-in-Progress Beta as there are a fair few bugs that need to ironed out. The bug list includes issues with NFC, GPS, Fingerprint, Camcorder and Encryption, as well as the absence of dual-SIM support; all of which may affect its general usability as a daily driver. But for a project that has just been released for the public, the progress is commendable and things will only improve as more people contribute back to the project.

The ROM supports all FRD versions of Honor 8. To install the ROM, you would need an unlocked bootloader as well as the special TWRP for CM builds on this device. For download links of the ROM and TWRP, as well as links to the Open Source Device Tree for the Honor 8, check out the CyanogenMod 13 thread in the forums!

For an OEM that was generally unknown for supporting development, the presence of an AOSP alternative, even if it originates from the community, is a step in the right direction in our books.

What are your thoughts on this CyanogenMod 13 build on the Honor 8? Let us know in the comments below!