Give Your Huawei P9 Stock Android Look

I managed to get my hands on the Ausdroid Huawei P9 review unit a week or so ago, specifically for the purpose of checking it out before deciding on what phone to buy the wife to replace her ageing Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. The P9 itself is a superbly crafted piece of hardware, as we have come to expect from Huawei. Unfortunately, for me, the EMUI skin that Huawei employ on their devices is often offensive to the eyes. I decided to have a crack at removing this the way I usually do, hacking it and flashing a custom ROM to it but ran into issues with the bootloader not behaving as it should.

Luckily, Huawei have included a themes app on the P9 and after a very short time searching I managed to find a Material Design theme to install. The theme, titled Material VUi, is very extensive and themes a heap of the EMUI apps from the P9. The features include:

• Full Material Design with Material notification drawer
• Huawei apps themed to Material
• Material Design icons added (around 8000)
• Statusbar of various apps themed to Material Design
• 3 custom navbars added
• Battery and signal icons themed

So what apps are themed? Settings, Themes app, Messaging, Phone, Gallery, Power menu, Updater, Music, Quick settings and notification drawer, Calendar, Files, Videos, Notepad, Calculator, Camera and more. As you can see below in the pics the theme is now very Googley Android and in my opinion much nicer to deal with on a daily basis. The theme does not include any fonts so if you want to change your font you can do that too by downloading the font you are after and installing it. The themes and fonts are easy to install — all you need to do is put the .hwt file into the hwthemes folder on the root of your internal storage and it will then show up in the Huawei Themes app.

If this theme is not to your liking there is a Coloured Marshmallow theme, iOS theme, Mate 9 and Mate 9 Porsche theme and more. Head over to XDA to check them all out if that floats your boat. Doing so could give your P9 a new lease on life. I hope that Huawei themselves check it out and possibly include a stock AOSP-style theme next time around as it gives users choice which is what Android is meant to be all about.