How to tweak your Realme handset

In this post I will share with you some tricks which are hard to find, and lessons learned after all the mistakes I made through the whole process tweaking my Realme GT powered by Android 12. Please be noted I still have fingerprint issues with certain apps at the moment. If you wanna root your handset runs ColorOS, take this into account.

I bought this Realme GT handset powered last year after my Xiaomi 8 went dead on me. This is a powerful yet cost effective Smartphone for me and I just love it, except for a few things. To name a few, a few apps and the phone itself vibrate from time to time even when I turned all vibrations off in settings as long as I can find them, whenever I open a few apps it tells me with a toast that internet access is denied and I can change the rules somewhere, of course I know because I did that myself, you just do not need to remind me every time I use them, the last but not the least, it’s really hot in summer, I can see sometimes the temperature reached almost 40 degrees which makes it quite uncomfortable to hold the phone.

So one year later after the warranty expired I decided to make a few tweaks, I just can’t take it anymore.

My very first step was to unlock the bootloader, I had some doubts about it last year as it would void the warranty, now that worry is long gone. Realme website provides an official app called deep testing which unlocks the bootloader in a few minutes, please keep in mind there are two versions of deep testing, one for Realme UI2, the other for Realme UI3, download accordingly. If deep testing does not work on your phone, check the version. Actually this works for all Realme handset. If you still have no idea how to unlock the bootloader, check out this thread from xda_developers.

My second step was to root the phone. Oh I love to root my handset so much as it allows to me to install a wide range of kernels and custom ROMs and make any changes to the phone as I wish. However over the past two or three years people seemed to get bored of rooting and flashing third-party ROMs. One reason is that the official ROM shipped with the phone is perfect and easy to use. Well this is certainly true to some mobile phones, while to others it’s quite the opposite. Take Realme or Xiaomi phone as an example, the pre-installed app market is recommending lots of apps where there is a chance and there’s nothing I can do about it. Meanwhile the browser is also showing all kinds of ads and so called news from time to time and the only thing I can do is turning its notification off from the status bar, which is very annoying.

Well this is my point, the phone makers can do many things to make me sick and there’s not much I can do until I root it. In my case I followed this thread to root my Realme GT in three easy steps WITHOUT installing recovery. Later on I installed Magisk and toggled deny list in case banking apps won’t work, which seemed to have caused the fingerprint stopped working in some apps, and I am still working on it.

Once above steps completed, I installed a few modules in Magisk, Uperf, Sui, Scene, MagikHide Props Config. Uperf will take control of CPU and GPU tuning from Android system, it can help reduce battery consumption and cool your phone, I use balance mode since I do not play games. The Uperf module works like a charm in my phone as it helps lowered the temp from almost 40℃ to 36℃ during the hottest days, and screen on time reached over 8 hours with auto refresh rate on, which is great giving I bought it a year ago. The Sui module is required by the app ops app, I use this app to control the permissions granted to apps. For example, I really hate apps vibrate, now I can deny apps the vibrate permission. Another example, it makes me really annoying when Android makes a toast telling me which app is denied of internet access whenever I open it. Now I can deny TOAST_WINDOW permission to systemui.apk and the toast is gone.

For those who do not want any extra app installed in their phone, you can use adb shell to do the same. What you need to do is enable Developer options by tapping Build number a few times, when you are in developer options check Disable permission monitoring and USB debugging at the same time. Disable permission monitoring is at the bottom in case you do not find it. If you have a Xiaomi Smartphone, you need to check other two options, Install via USB, and USB Debugging (Security Settings).

Once you have done the setting thing on your phone, connect it to your Computer via USB cable, type below command-line and hit enter.

adb shell appops set package_name permission allow/deny

Remember to replace the package_name with your actual package name, and permission with your actual one like VIBRATE, TOAST_WINDOW etc. The good news is that you do not need to root your phone to do the adb thing.

I also installed Root Explorer 4.9.2 to manage my files. It does not work quite well on Android 12, one scenario is that it crashes when I use it to delete files. However it beat every other file browser I know in set permissions to folders under Android/data. This is important to me as many apps download their newer versions or save lots of debug files in the background and I could not stop it in any other way. With Root Explorer I can deny their write permission and no more auto updates.

I would also recommend another well known app called MyAndroidTools, it requires root access and that’s what I can offer. The app will allow you to disable services, receivers and activities for any app including system apps, so be cautious when use it. I use it to disable those download service and any other such services that let the app run in the background even when the screen is off.

However what I like it most is that it helps you to freeze or uninstall system apps. I used it to disable Realme app market (com.heytap.market) and the browser (com.heytap.browser), and oh my world is so clean all of a sudden. I know many of you hates these two assholes too, right?

However, unlock the bootloader and root your Realme handset isn’t without a price to pay. I am still working on the fingerprint issue. I can use fingerprint to unlock my phone and even some apps, but I can’t use it to unlock some pay apps, I have tried almost all methods and none of them worked. If you know how to solve it, please help me, thanks.