[Help] Due to keyboard [OpenBoard] failure I've been locked out of my teracube 2e!

General Bug reports
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#1

Hi everyone,

fellow European newbie teracuber here!

First of all I would like to thank the team that has been working on the Teracube2e: the idea behind the smartphone is terrific and it seems really well executed. And even when some issues occur, as in my case, I trust the community support.

So, here’s my case: during the last couple of days I’ve been setting up my teracube, my previous smartphones were all mainstream consumer ones, strictly android. I’m not an expert at all, but I’m willing to learn.

While setting up my teracube I decided, for privacy concerns, to install a new keyboard, open-source and not linked to google, called OpenBoard [ Version 1.4.2, apk downloaded from f-droid].
Everything worked absolutely fine, I disabled Gboard, the default one.
I then had to turn the teracube off, remove the battery (I needed to remove the sd-card), and turn it on again and, as the smartphone turned on and asked me to enter my password (no finger print, no pin, no gesture, no facial rec) the keyboard just didn’t show up, resulting in me being locked out of my phone.
I rebooted it three or four times, even with battery removal in between, but it’s always the same, I get no keyboard trough which entering my password.

What can I do? Would getting it to safe mode be helpful? And how can I prevent such failures from happening in the future? Should I use a keyboard of choice and not disable the default one?

Thanks in advance to anyone who will be so kind to try and help me get back in my beloved teracube.

Best regards,
b4da

#2

Little update #1:

I’ve been spending my whole morning (during which I should have been working) trying to solve this problem.
The best idea I had so far was to try and mirror my teracube screen in order to unlock it from my laptop.
Sadly I hadn’t allowed USB debugging on the device in advance, and, from what I’ve been reading online, there’s no easy way to do it from pc. And without USB debugging active, no software will ever mirror the screen of my teracube.

Is there anyone who can suggest better solutions?

Best regards,
b4da

#3

The issue is most likely caused by your keyboard app not working at boot time or something similar.

You might know this already. If nothing else works, you can do a factory reset via the recovery menu.

1 Like
#4

Hey @Sharad, thank you for your kind reply.

Before going for the factory reset I was hoping to try and find a convenient workaround. I mean, do you think there’s something else I could do?

  • Would an OTG cable be of any use?

  • What about safe mode, could it be used to “wake up” the keyboard app somehow?

  • Above all: how can I prevent such failures from happening in the future. Should I leave The GBoard app active even if I’m not using it in order to let the system charge it in case OpenBoard fails?

I can’t believe there’s no safe alternative to Google. I guess it would be kind of sad for the whole IT community and I’m sure there’s plenty of experts out there ready to prove me wrong (and I couldn’t be happier about it).

However, I can’t even describe how frustrating this whole situation feels, it’s literally like having an expensive brick that can receive phone calls in your pocket, you better answer those calls tho.
Jokes aside, I really hope someone will find some time to try and tutor me through this or I will have to factory reset the device in a few hours.

Thank you again Sharad, wish everyone a good day and keep up the awesome work!

Best regards,
bada

#5

I would say yes best to not disable the Gboard keyboard. Since if not using it; it shouldn’t be a concern for snooping.

As for a safe alternative that works during boot you’d likely need a custom rom.