Last Updated on September 20, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake
You can get TWRP installed on your Google Pixel 2 smartphone so you have replaced the stock recovery with a custom one. Not only that but the best custom recovery image in the world.
A custom recovery image is useful for providing a platform for getting custom ROMs installed. It’ll also prove useful if you want to get root access via a tool that you can flash directly from the custom recovery image itself, like SuperSU for example.
Sometimes a device can have more than one custom recovery image made available and yet if you read the custom ROM descriptions, they might request that you have a particular custom recovery image installed. With TWRP you can’t go wrong. Since it is the best custom recovery image currently available, no ROM is going to request anything else.
This is what you need to get the TWRP image installed on your Google Pixel 2 smartphone so you can go ahead with flashing custom ROMs and other files.
Details We Should Know
- You need to have unlocked the Google Pixel 2’s bootloader before you can get a custom recovery image flashed on it. Use Google to find a guide on how to unlock it and then come back to this guide and finish it.
- You need to have a computer that is running on a version of the Windows operating system to follow this guide. It’s possible to get the ADB and Fastboot installed on Mac and Linux, but you need different files for those, and the commands are slightly different.
Files We Need
- Download the command line tools from the SDK tools package links at the bottom of the Android Studio webpage or just download the Minimal ADB and Fastboot instead, depending on which one you want to use (either will do the job just fine).
- Download the Universal ADB Driver package.
- Download the TWRP image file for your Google Pixel 2. There are two files on the webpage. They are just where the files are being hosted and have nothing to do with model numbers.
How to Install TWRP on Google Pixel 2 Smartphones
1. Start by installing the Universal ADB Driver on the computer by downloading the package and then following the instructions to get it installed. Then you can run ADB commands and connect your device to the computer without needing to worry about any other drivers.
2. Copy the TWRP .img file over to the same folder as the ADB and Fastboot that you got from the command line tools/minimal ADB installer and rename the TWRP file as “twrp.img.”
3. From within the TWRP/ADB/Fastboot folder, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and right-click the white background where there are no files and then select “open a command window here” from the menu.
4. Now from your Google Pixel 2 smartphone, head to Settings > About and then tap on the build number at least seven times, so you unlock the Developer Options menu. Then head back to the Settings and open the newly unlocked Developer Options menu and enable the USB Debugging mode.
5. Connect the Google Pixel 2 smartphone pot the computer using the USB cable.
6. Type the adb reboot bootloader command into the command line and hit “Enter” to get your Google Pixel 2 smartphone into the bootloader mode.
7. Type the fastboot flash recovery twrp.img command into the command line and hit “Enter” the custom recovery image flashed on the Google Pixel 2 smartphone.
8. Type the fastboot reboot command to reboot out of bootloader mode and before the operating system boots, hold the key combination for Recovery mode so it boots directly to Recovery instead.
By booting directly into custom recovery, you are not allowing the stock version of the recovery to wipe over the custom version. You’ll then have the custom recovery that you can boot into by using the same key combination as the stock recovery up until you choose to flash the stock ROM again. It is the stock ROM that brings back the stock recovery with it.