Samsung S7 Rom Update to Oreo

[timbo343]

My S7 has been unlocked as i bought it locked to a carrier and had it unlocked. At the moment it's running Nougat version 7 and was thinking of flashing it to Oreo.

 

I've never done this before so i'm asking for a bit of help on which Rom is the best to use and how to actually do it.

 

Ta

[Garacesh]

You'll want to skulk around the XDA forums for a bit. If it's anything like my old S7 Edge, there's a tool called Odin that allows you to flash it relatively painlessly, but you'll still need to do a chunk of research first.

Personally, I used a ROM called Renovate Edge for mine (before I dropped it ), I'm fairly certain there was a standard S7 flavour too. I can't imagine the phones being too different. No idea if it's still in development though. But you're never short of ROMs to choose from for flagship phones. Generally speaking, once you've nailed the recovery environment, radio settings, and flashing the ROM, you can just keep bouncing between ROMs until you find one you like.

 

Phones are a lot more resilient when flashing than they used to be, so it's a lot harder to brick your phone now, but it is still possible, so consider this your 'here be dragons' warning. Measure twice thrice four times, cut once.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Garacesh

[Arthur]

there's a tool called Odin that allows you to flash it relatively painlessly

With Odin being an internal Samsung tool, you have to be careful where you download it from. As @abillybob found out, it's quite easy to download a trojaned version if you're not careful.

 

Heimdall is a good open source alternative to Odin...

 

https://glassechidna.com.au/heimdall/

 

Why 'Heimdall'?

For internal use, Samsung developed their own firmware flashing tool known as 'Odin', named after the king of gods in Norse mythology. Loke, the software component that runs on the Samsung devices and provides the functionality necessary to flash, also seems to be named after an important character in Norse mythology (often translated as Loki). In this vein, our software was named 'Heimdall' after the Norse god and guardian of the Bifrost Bridge.

 

What platforms does Heimdall run on?

Officially - Linux, OS X and Windows (XP, Vista, 7 etc.)

 

Why use Heimdall when we can use Samsung's tool, Odin?

Aside from being slow and generally unreliable, Odin only runs on Windows systems. Furthermore, Odin is 'leaked software' that is not officially supported by Samsung, freely available, or well understood by the community at large.

[Garacesh]

Ooh nice. I'm going to assume that Heimdall wasn't a thing when I did my S7 Edge, or at least I don't recall there being any mention of it, but if there's a proper tool that has ongoing support, yeah, use that instead.

[Arthur]

I'm going to assume that Heimdall wasn't a thing when I did my S7 Edge

I think it must be fairly new since it also wasn't an option when I did my Galaxy Tab S 10.5.