Xiaofan

BTW, the H96 Max+ box I have is rooted and I installed Termux and rooted package works fine (eg: libusb) and I can even build libftdi on the box using clang.  So technically I can change the files. Still I do not know if there is anything related to the boot sequence that I can change.

I remember I had similar problems a few months ago when I tried installing Armbian on my TX3 mini for the first time. I did some tests back then and if I recall correctly mounting any Linux partition (extX) on Android seemed to be changing the file system to use SElinux permissions, which prevented Armbian from even reaching the first login prompt. I had the same problem even after having everything running and simply mounting the SD card or HDD on Android, it simply messed everything up, and changing all permissions back was time consuming, so I simply do NOT mount any linux filesystem when running Android on the box. Actually I never even boot Android, I bought the box specifically to run Armbian, sadly I haven't had time to play with it for over a month now.
But the symptom was as you described, I prepared the SD card, updated the box to multiboot (via Android, so it mounted the linux filesystem on the SD card and messed it up right there), and no matter what dtb file I used it would halt somewhere like what you showed. After rewriting the SD card and not mounting it on Android (I already had multiboot), Armbian booted out of the box, but it took me some time to figure that out. After I had the system working I booted Android and inserted the SD card, and I was again not able to fully boot Armbian due to SElinux permissions on certain system files (actually all over the filesystem, but fixing the permissions to a few system files made the system bootable again. Afterwards I still had to fix the whole filesystem nonetheless). I tried a few things after I had the system running from an HDD, and simply mounting this HDD on Android was enough to "update" the file permissions and make Armbian unbootable again. In summary, at least with my TX3 mini, I cannot mount any media with Armbian partitions on Android. I believe my box has Android 7.1 from March/2018.
In fewer words, your problem is probably not with the Android Update app, but with Android itself whenever it mounts the extX partition(s). Hope this helps somehow.