Last update : 13/3/2025 (forgot them multiple variants, firmware hell, & "misc improvements")
Introduction
LG V30 ‐ a device I regretted buying right after I got it. When I got it, the display had already developed a severe burn‐in, the battery barely lasts a day, and the back glass is cracked. All of them were eventually replaced, although at the cost of the fingerprint scanner not having enough clearance to connect to its pins & work (it was eventually fixed by sticking a stack of electrical tapes; but I eventually got another fingerprint scanner complete with its sticky bracket, which I still had to boost by 1 stack of electrical tape).
Summary : Mostly breaks the mold of bootloader vs. hardware, but pays for it by not having any form of storage encryption on custom ROMs (or having one (userdata only) but demands ≥A15). Oh yeah ‐ spare parts for the V30 seems to be quite scarce (especially the decent ones) nowadays.
Physical features
Thin & light will be the first thing that comes in mind when holding the V30.
- On the top section, there's the secondary mic & the headphone jack is on the right corner, which IMO is the 2nd best place.
- USB-C charging port, speaker, & primary mic on the bottom corner.
- Left section contains only the volume buttons.
- Right section is home to the hybrid dual SIM tray, or a SIM & microSD tray if it's the single‐SIM variant.
- Front side is reserved for the thin bezeled 6.0' 18:9 pOLED, front camera, & earpiece. The bezels are thin by 2017 standards, so take that as you will. But still, I'll take this layout (preferably with dual front-facing speakers) over nowadays' ultra-thin bezels with hole-punch camera(s) and/or notches.
- The back holds the rear cameras & power button / fingerprint scanner.
- For materials, Gorilla Glass 5 on front & back, with aluminium frame.
- For the buttons, the volume buttons are clicky without much wobble, and the power button is decently clicky. The fingerprint scanner embedded on the power button is fast & accurate.
- Vibration haptics in the V30 is strong, and 15ms in Simple Keyboard is my sweet spot.
- JerryRigEverything durability test video
Audio Quality
The V30 has a bottom loudspeaker & a headphone jack. The earpiece can also double as a second speaker by modifying mixer_paths_tavil, though the earpiece itself is too weak to matter.
The speaker quality is lousy ‐ it lacks volume & sounds somewhat tinny. As previously mentioned, the earpiece is helpless for second speaker purposes.
The headphone jack quality is better than most, with audio quality being louder than most others. The Quad DAC also helps, but enabling this in AOSP ROMs (≤Pie; with Oreo blobs) enable an annoying screen off swipe controls that can't be turned off. The screen‐off swipe controls aren't enabled on ≥A10 ROMs.
Additional notes for the Quad DAC : Enabling it makes your headphones sound better & louder, but will introduce some background noise, which gets more noticeable at louder volumes and/or weaker headphones.
Display
The 6.0' 18:9 pOLED is a decent & workable display, as far as I'm concerned. Though, turned-off blacks are the thing that I truly like from OLED panels; which this panel won't offer if it's not a perfect black (sometimes there's black crush, particularly on lower brightness levels).
What I dislike about the panel though, is the fact that it's an OLED. Over time, it will develop burn‐in. That, when combined with Fate/GO's blue bars (or any static element such as the top & bottom bars), is a burn‐in incident waiting to eventually happen. This issue can be somewhat mitigated with Smart Pixels, if the ROMs provide it.
Bootloader unlocking & custom ROM setup
The bootloader unlocking process is quite involved, depending on the variant you got.
H932 (T‐Mobile) can use fastboot oem unlock, but requires lafsploit (archive.org) to install TWRP as fastboot boot & flash commands aren't available there.
For non-H932 (everything else), use the WTF method (archive.org). This method requires converting and/or downgrading to pre‐July 2018 Oreo firmware with fastboot flash commands before flashing bootloader unlock code, then restoring latest firmware to regain certain functions (depending on which variant you got you can skip this) before rooting it. Of course, the hardest part is downloading the firmware files, especially for the Japanese (l01k / V35 isai) variants (which also lacked fastboot mode); followed with Master Reset (which requires you to do some button dance to wipe the device).
If you opt for the official method (which is no longer applicable), it's only available for EU variants. US998 is also available, though it requires fucking around with the drop‐down menu. Perhaps not requiring the Master Reset (and/or various files from God‐knows‐where) was its biggest perk...
Repairability
In terms of repairability, it's in line with most glass-backed phones, except with one rather annoying twist ‐ the contact pads, particularly for the fingerprint scanner. OK ‐ there's one good twist ‐ that coaxial cable can be considered absent since it attach to the undersides of the motherboard (under the board, to different parts of the motherboard).
- Back panel demands heat & suction cup to remove and glue to re‐attach, with fingerprint sensor / power button combo (by default) & camera bump (including flash diffuser) adhered to it. The back panel is glass, so it shouldn't distort from excessive heat but additional care on prying needs to be taken if you don't want it to break (and I recommend keeping some spare back panels at the ready in the likely case you broke it when prying it out).
- More on the fingerprint / power combo : It connects to the motherboard with contact pins (so accidentally ripping it off when opening rear panel should be impossible) ‐ power button connects easily to its pins, while the fingerprint scanner requires some extra clearance to reach its contact pins, especially if the sticky bracket meant for it is missing. I'd rather adhere the fingerprint / power combo to the motherboard cover than the back panel ‐ and I managed to do so with some liquid adhesive, though there's not much room to adhere it to. And you do need to ensure the fingerprint cable does not adhere to the back panel if you're going that route.
- Motherboard cover / wireless charging coil / NFC pad (which also holds the motherboard in place, along with microSD/SIM tray) is held by 7 Philips screws, whereas the speaker module is held by 3 Philips screws. All of the cover screws are equal in size & length, so you can kinda get away with not sorting them out, for now.
- microSD / SIM reader's soldered on the motherboard, though that's common for every phone nowadays except for ASUS ZS630KL / Zenfone 6 2019 / 6z (which had their own module board for the trays adhered to the midframe). It's mounted on the back side of the motherboard, but you can consider its tray the only other thing keeping the motherboard stuck to midframe, other than those board covers with their screws.
- The battery is held down with come adhesives & lacks any pull tabs. Prying isn't too difficult due to the adhesive, though caution needs to be taken as you might pry right into the display cable (which is under the bottom‐right section of the battery). Under the battery there's a hole that leads into the display's copper layer.
- For Lego-like BTBs, it's used for the battery, cameras, charging port, screen, and touch sensor. Everything else relies on contact pins. Those BTBs are not designed with repairability in mind, as some of them are surrounded by various capacitors, making removals requiring some precision.
- Headphone jack (which is its own module) are held down by adhesive & 1 Philips screw.
- Charging port is on its flex cable & coupled with the bottom microphone, held down by 2 Philips screws & the entire motherboard. The top microphone (which is beside the earpiece) is its own detachable module if you un‐adhered it.
- Display is very much glued in place, so say goodbye to it if you ever wanted to try replacing the entire thing for the 1st time (if sticking to same midframe). Then again, your display's probably beyond any helping in that scenario, so good luck.
Teardown references :
Custom ROM & Kernel Availability (as of 8/3/2025)
Custom ROMs for the V30 is not good.
- Before 2020, we have various ROMs, ranging from A9/Oreo blobs to maybe some A10/Pie blobs (with a Telegram‐only flashable fix for Wi‐Fi issues). All of them lacked encryption support, and the option for it (which does not work) is not hidden away.
- As of October 2020, all developers for A10/Pie ROMs adopted Permissive SELinux to make their ROMs run on all V30s. And this issue extended to most A11 builds as well.
- In 21 July 2022, lifehackerhansol made an A11 LineageOS build with Enforcing SELinux. However, it suffered from the dreaded time reset on boot, which remained unfixed until unofficial A13, build 20230117. Yes, even A12L were affected, so it's essentially unusable on the V30.
- Nowadays, we only have official LineageOS (and maybe some unofficial ROMs by the others?) spearheaded by lifehackerhansol, who is continuously attempting to port the latest Android crap up the V30, even if issues pop up everywhere. 24/1/2025 Late update : lifehackerhansol gets dynamic partitions & userdata encryption on the V30, but only on A15 for now.
For custom recovery, there's only lifehackerhansol's unofficial TWRP, which was maintained until he abandoned TWRP in favor of A15 development. Sure, there's some old builds of TWRP & OrangeFox around, but previously mentioned unofficial worked with older ROMs as well so I believe mentioning them is unneccesary.
As for custom kernels... don't bother, the V30's kernel development is over at this point. KSU‐capable kernels exist, but only for ≥A14 & in the LGEV30 telegram group. 8/3/2025 Update : LGV30U Telegram group has published a fork of Haumea kernel (for A9/A10, blob version not mentioned) with KernelSU‐Next 1.0.5.
8/3/2025 Update : Linking jacoa's LG V30 files SourceForge repository just in case.
Other issues
Let's start out with the bad ones :
- AOSP ROMs can't run encrypted, whether it's full-disk or file-based (with the former depreciated after A11). ≥A15 brought in userdata encryption, which is not exactly comparable to FBE.
- volte sur!! Those who still think the LG V30 is a phone should stay on stock, as LG's IMS implementation is not portable to custom ROMs.
- Multiple carrier and/or region variants adding to the confusion (most notably T‐Mobile H932 & the Japanese l01k (Docomo) & V35 isai (KDDI)) the latter 2 (l01k & V35 isai) showing up in the development scene (for added NFC support because different NFC hardware) by August 2024 (at least as far as I'm aware) without any known firmware archives aside from jacoa's LG V30 files, which only stored latest TWRP‐flashable firmware zipfiles).
V35 isai is not to be confused with the actual LG V35 ThinQ (which is just the LG V30 with a Snapdragon 845 & added ay‐eye branding that when spoken out loud closely relates to LG's queue line for their phones back then).
- lg‐firmwares.com (which you will probably open at least once for V30 .kdz files, if only because your search engine showed this result first) demands Goolag recaptcha (impress that cat Spike! the cat fled?! FETCH THAT BONE SPIKE! bone taken? SIT LIKE A HOOMAN!) before you can even get an arbitrary 20 second wait time before getting a download link... that doesn't seem to respond. Androidfilehost.com (which is also used to mirror some .kdz files as well, though you probably wouldn't know that (at least without opening some XDA thread), which your search engine should show if you know what you're searching for) is not quite reliable (at least on opening pages, suggesting its maintainers no longer care about the site).
Then move on to the questionably good one :
- The device can boot without its front camera and/or fingerprint scanner (but not the power button obviously, which needs to be adhered to either back panel or motherboard cover) in place.
And, finally, the actually good ones that I don't really give a fuck :
- MIL‐STD‐810G compliant, which should make the device more resistant to abuse, before counting other stuff like age, damages, and/or repairs.
- Wireless charging (input‐only)
Input-only wireless charging sounds meh nowadays, but at least it's there. Though it is usually hotter & slower than regular wired charging, but it's either battery getting cooked faster or the charging port getting worn out at this point (which is an unfortunately easy choice for me considering I have no Qi chargers).
Conclusion
All things considered, the only thing I can recommend the V30 for is as some offline music player. And that's only if you kept your own V30 around in the first place, because I don't think I can recommend getting it in any way.
- All <A15 AOSP ROMs for the V30 lack any kind of internal storage encryption, ensuring no barriers between your files & anyone who has physical access to your V30. Not to mention you compromise either compatibility, security, stability, or any combinations of them; depending on which ROM you've chose (old gold or new‐fangled trash).
- As if this issue wasn't enough, device comparisons (compared with what I've got) completely destroys the V30 off my sights, even if the V30 had a better DAC than everybody else.
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