Chinese Verizon s6e+(sm-g928v) with different firmware(of (sm-g928f))?

thisisavi

New member
Aug 10, 2018
2
0
0
I know this phone is very old at this point. But my mom has been using this Verizon s6e+ that was bought from china (not from a official retail store) and it works on other operators! In fact, the phone itself doesn't recognize that it is a Verizon model. The about phone section says that the model number is SM-G928F, so I believed it had a ported firmware(!) and didn't give much thought into it. I didn't know Verizon phones are extra secured until 2 days ago. She upgraded to a s9+ and so I started searching for roms for this phone. I found a TWRP for the sm-928f, and tried to flash it with Odin, but that's when I git confused - the phone still has a locked bootloader. In Odin Download mode, it even says the phone model is SM-G928V.
As far as my understanding goes, it means that the Chinese folks have managed to bypass the Verizon lock, kept the bootloader intact, and installed a unlocked international firmware?
I came here to find someone more experienced on these to work on this case, i can confirm the following:
- Factory reset from phone settings reverts the phone to a new g928f; haven't tried wiping from recovery.
- most of Samsung/Verizon bloats are uninstallable just normally, but they appear again after a factory reset.
- the phone is stuck at Android 6.0.1 with TouchWiz and tapping software update from settings does nothing
Any devs interested in this case? Can this device potentially give us the solution to rooting Verizon phones?
Screenshots and photos: gdrive/folderview?id=1CaGu0NWwyz4AeR_XecaxlMTmtGVfX6Q0