Samsung sells its flagship Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series in different processor configurations depending on the region. The US, China, and Hong Kong versions of the company's flagships get Snapdragon SoCs, while the rest of the world gets Exynos chips. This year, the US/China/Hong Kong variants of the Samsung Galaxy S10 phones featured the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, while the rest of the world got the Exynos 9820 variant. It was the same story with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10, with the Snapdragon 855 being restricted to the aforementioned three regions, and the rest of the world getting the international Exynos 9825 variant. While the international Exynos variants have unlockable bootloaders, the bootloaders of the US carrier Snapdragon variants are not unlockable. The story gets more complicated when it is known that there are some variants (the Hong Kong variant, for example) of the Snapdragon Galaxy S10/Galaxy Note 10 phones that do have unlockable bootloaders that allow for rooting, flashing TWRP, and more.

In terms of development, what this means is that the Exynos variants of Samsung's flagship phones can have their bootloaders unlocked, can be rooted, and custom recoveries/ROMs can be flashed on them. The unlockable Snapdragon variants also have the potential for development because of unlockable bootloaders, but they are restricted by very limited availability. The US carrier variants of the Snapdragon Samsung phones, on the other hand, are locked down and hence, they can't be rooted, and users can't flash custom recoveries/ROMs.

At the start of this month, unofficial variants of TWRP were developed for the unlockable bootloader variants of the Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6. Now, the following Samsung devices have received official TWRP support (device codenames have been mentioned in parenthesis):

  • Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ (d2q)
  • Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy Note 10 (d1q)
  • Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy S10+ (beyond2qlte)
  • Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy S10 (beyond1qlte)
  • Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy S10e (beyond0qlte)
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 LTE (gts6l)
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Wi-Fi (gts6lwifi)

It should be noted that the Galaxy Tab S6 comes in two variants (Wi-Fi/LTE), but both of them are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. As the US carrier variants of the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note 10 don't have unlockable bootloaders, they don't have TWRP support, and will not have it for the foreseeable future.

Now that official TWRP recoveries have been released, we can expect the first custom ROMs to start being developed for these Snapdragon variants of the Samsung devices. In contrast, the Exynos variant of the Galaxy Note 10+ already has a few One UI-based ROMs developed for it.

The download links for the TWRP recoveries are posted below: