Hey folks, i'm assuming that out of the many who got a Axon 7 from JB or Officeworks recently, at least some of you have tried rooting it.
From what i've read on XDA, it seems a lot riskier inititally than a Samsung where you might trip the Knox counter but apart from that nothing happens.
"ZTE has designed the phone to brick itself if you try to mod it" is the most alarmist view i've seen so far.
Anyway, my phone is still marshmallow build 11, it seems to fall into a nether region of guides for build 1-10 and then guides for nougat.
If you've done it already please lemme know in the comments and smash them mf subscribe like buttons!
UPDATE
Ok, so I've successfully unlocked the boot-loader and installed TWRP and LineageOS 14.1. There's a Oreo build floating around but i want xposed framework.
I did it by following this GUIDE (which mentions only Marshmallow Builds 1-10 but it worked on mine which was b11).
Pretty much everything that the guide said could go wrong happened to me but all the work arounds worked including…
Part A.15 Mine did not show up as QUSB_BULK in device manager and i had to use
Zadig as described here
Part C.5 I did need to install the Universal_Bootloader before installing the bootstack and then Lineage. For whatever reason, the LineageOS rom refused to install otherwise which is also addressed in that main GUIDE.
Miscellaneous stuff….
I flashed with nano Gapps (arm64 7.1) and the stock Lineage Super User addons. I tried using the latest SuperSU from the chainfires page and it was on the booting logo for about half an hour. I've experience 10 minute boot times for devices with a new rom before but i gave this one half an hour before giving up.
Flashing Lineage, gapps and Lineages own addonsu first boot only took a couple of minutes.
After installing the rom, I also did have to manually format the data partitition from encrypted f2fs to ext4.
Finally, I read that at the point you want to replace your first TWRP (the one they keep warning not to do any backups or restores with) there are some versions of TWRP around that can wipe your IMEI numbers but I used version 3.2.0-0 from TWRP.ME.
Anyhow, this was maybe the hardest device i've rooted, or at least the most potentially dangerous. Done heaps of Samsung devices and they are all pretty easy as long as you don't care about voiding your warranty.
Read all that guide and probs best to ask any questions
Best of luck!
You can get Nougat for Azon 7 if interested.