Huawei and their subsidiary Honor ship their smartphones and tablets with their EMUI software. It's a heavily modified version of the stock Android framework that offers a lot of features not found in AOSP. Some people prefer all of the added features while the stock Android purists would much rather have stock Android running on top of Huawei/Honor hardware. If that describes you, then you may want to check out the work done by the OpenKirin team. They recently released unofficial LineageOS, CarbonROM, and Resurrection Remix builds for all EMUI 8 devices.

OpenKirin is a team of developers who aim to make AOSP-based custom ROMs available for Huawei/Honor devices. In the past, their work was limited thanks to the difficulty in working with HiSilicon Kirin devices. But thanks to Project Treble compatibility, much of their work has been simplified and so they've been able to support more devices. With this in mind, the team has opened up a new website to accommodate their growing list of supported devices. The list of supported devices includes any current EMUI 8 device (either launched with it or updated to it). The team has released a single LineageOS, CarbonROM, and Resurrection Remix image that works across their list of supported devices (you can think of it as a Kirin-specific Generic System Image.)

Currently, OpenKirin supports exactly 17 devices. These devices are:

If you want to install the ROMs, you can download them from the link below. The flashing instructions are also linked below, but the page is currently empty. Most likely you'll just need to flash the images provided via Fastboot or TWRP, though. If you're interested, you'll have to hurry, however.

For a long time, Huawei/Honor was tolerant of the developer community, but recently it appears that the company's leadership has changed their minds by ending bootloader unlocking for all devices. If you own a Huawei or Honor smartphone or tablet and want to flash a custom ROM, kernel, or other modification, you have until July 22nd, 2018 to request a bootloader unlock code. Maybe there will be some third-party way to unlock the bootloader on Huawei/Honor devices, but no one knows for sure.

Download OpenKirin ROMs for Huawei/Honor devices running EMUI 8

Flashing Instructions