If you are an owner of either Exynos Galaxy S8 or a Galaxy S8 Plus, you must be aware that it became possible to flash the official TWRP recovery image since April. It is no secret that international Galaxy S8 variants are much easier to unlock than Snapdragon ones as you need to do is go to the Developer Options menu for enabling the OEM Unlock option. Their Snapdragon counterparts are more locked down and even though most Snapdragon Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ devices have not yet received the official bootloader unlock method, the official TWRP recovery images have already been ported for them.
We need to thank XDA’s contributor, maintainer and developer ‘jesec’ who is the person responsible for putting together the TWRP images for the international Galaxy S8 and S8+. It is currently on version 3.1.1 and they have made it pretty clear that these specific images will not work on the Exynos variants. This list also includes the International (F/FD), Korean (N), and Exynos LDU (X) variants.
Since the TWRP images are not yet available on the official TWRP website, you can look for them as they are hosted on jesec’s Google Drive account. You can also look for the source code used in it by going to jesec’s GitHub page.
Downloads
You may also be aware of the fact that most versions of the Snapdragon Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ come with a locked bootloader. That necessarily isn’t the case anymore. Samsung has decided to ship Snapdragon Galaxy S8 and S8+ in countries such as China and these models are not locking down the bootloader. Now while TWRP images available for the versions having a unlockable bootloader, the recovery will become far more relevant once the Snapdragon models receive the official bootloader unlocking methods.
