HTC Desire 816 locked to Chinese app store

Forums › Android › HTC Desire 816 locked to Chinese app store

rossmnz

507 posts

Ultimate Geek

#151313 20-Aug-2014 23:49

Hi guys,

Just been given a HTC Desire 816 from in-laws in China.

Appears to be locked to the Chinese app store - yet it works on 2Degrees network.

Do I need this unlocked, or put a custom ROM on it or what?

Pretty much only used iphones since the first one lol so dont have much knowledge about Android!

Any help would be appreciated!

The force is strong with this one!

dragonx

49 posts

Geek

#1113884 23-Aug-2014 07:50

I would head over to XDA to sort or reflash it, given you might never have flashed firmware on an android do be careful and read up...

http://forum.xda-developers.com/desire-816#subForums

NikT

1710 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1114937 25-Aug-2014 09:05

Your Chinese model will likely have a different model number to the standard international variant, so you'll need to do a fair bit of reading and frequency-checking to determine whether other regions' software is compatible (Or, indeed, if the device will allow the flashing of other regions' software at all).

I have some past experience with Chinese Android software builds, and generally speaking you can sort out the lack of Google apps by rooting the device, installing a custom recovery like Clockworkmod, and then flashing the most recent 'Gapps' package that's usually used for custom distributions like Cyanogenmod. Gapps packages contain everything Googly, including the background frameworks required for the Google apps to work.

You will, of course, void any warranty by doing this and knock yourself off of the OTA update path, but you may be able to install full ROMs as they become available, then reflash the Gapps.

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