Heimdall
More info
- Creator
- Benjamin Dobell
- Type
- Flashing tool
- License
- MIT
- Source
- github.com
Free software that reverse-engineered Samsung's Odin protocol so Galaxy devices can be flashed from Linux and macOS, not just Windows.
Written by Australian developer Benjamin Dobell (Glass Echidna) in the early 2010s, after he traced the USB traffic between Odin and a phone in Download Mode. The result was a cross-platform command-line tool under the MIT licence, with an optional graphical front-end.
The name is a fitting joke: in Norse myth Heimdall is the watchman who sees everything — here the one reading Odin's secrets. For years it was the standard way for Linux users to install the Android build LineageOS on a Galaxy, but it lags on the newest models, where Samsung has changed both partitioning and signing.