the pocophone f1 is a truly remarkable
device it's got a flagship tier snapdragon 845 soc a 6.18 inch ips
display six gigs of RAM 128 gigs of storage and a 4 000 milliamp
hour battery and it costs just 300 us
dollars off contract so then why weren't
we all excited about the pocophone f1 when everyone else was a month ago the
specs of this thing are amazing
well it's because the included miui operating
system is imo tarabad
so we're going to walk you guys through how you can turn this 300 flagship
killer into almost a pixel 3xl
equivalent for free
now even if you do like miui there's a
fair bit of evidence that xiaomi is intentionally nerfing the camera on the
f1 through software to keep their budget
poco phone brand from competing with their higher end devices
so Android software flashing then honestly
i haven't given much thought to custom roms since samsung ditched touchwiz and
cyanogenmod died a couple of years ago but lineage os which was founded shortly
after cyanogenic's demise by a few of its core developers has been going
strong ever since lineage os shares many of cyanogenmod's strengths like its lack
of bloatware solid customization and regular security updates but oddly
enough one difference is that it doesn't have the stock google apps by default
thanks to some legal encouragement from google so that stuff will need to be
flashed on afterward more on that later the point is once you put it all
together you end up with what is effectively the stock Android experience
like you would get on a pixel device and with a little bit of tinkering we
can even make it look like the new pixel 3s so that's what we're gonna do now
it's almost time to begin but before i do i want to put a big disclaimer this
process is going to involve wiping it you will lose your data
all right so with that out of the way let's get started you'll need a computer
and a usb cable as well as a full charge on your phone's battery to ensure that
it doesn't die during the following procedure starting in the settings app we're going
to navigate to about phone then click the miui version or build number until
it says you are now a developer totally for that easy what this actually
does is unlock the developer options that we're going to need for this
process including usb debugging and oem unlocking
on xiaomi phones like the pocophone unlocking the bootloader requires you to
register your device to a xiaomi account with a linked phone number after which
there is a 72-hour waiting period before you can unlock the bootloader once your
device is registered to your me account with the phone number download the me
unlock app to your pc from the description we'll have that down below
and run through the steps in the app your phone should now have an unlocked
bootloader which allows you to flash a custom recovery firmware
next up we'll be installing our custom recovery firmware this will allow us to
flash our third-party os onto the device
so we will need platform tools linked in the description so download and extract
that then move the entire contents to a folder named adb in the root of your
computer's c drive with those files in place plug the
device into your pc and then hold the volume down and power buttons until you
are in fastboot mode at this point it's probably a good idea to start
downloading the larger files that you'll need including the 9.0 firmware and
vendor files the latest lineage os build and twrp
all of these are also linked in the video description
back on the pc open cmd and now we can
get to flashing our custom recovery firmware first up we're going to check if
fastboot can detect our connected device once that's good to go we can move our
twrp recovery file into the adb directory flash it and then boot to it
back on the phone you should be booted into twrp mode so there should be a
prompt for a password here but just click cancel and then wipe just the data
partition go ahead and reboot to recovery and then
we can copy over both the disable force encryption and magisk files we're going
to install the encryption disabler first followed by magisk with a reboot in
between now our poco f1 is rooted and
ready for a custom rom at this point you can choose between
lineage os pixel experience or whatever
else you're into but we ran into some weird bugs with pixel experience so
we're not ready to recommend it at this time since lineage os doesn't come with
google apps you'll need a couple of extra steps here so we're going to need
to download them separately at the link in the video description
please note that you must use the ARM 64
Android 9.0 nano variant this has a very
small number of apps but the larger packages can cause issues so just grab
anything else that you're missing from the play store later stick with nano
please so copy over the rom files including the
vendor firmware the lineage os build and the google apps that we downloaded just
then and start by installing the vendor firmware followed by the lineage os file
and the google apps lastly clear the cache and then reboot
the phone back to Android and congratulations you now have a fully
functional lineage os equipped flagship killer
but you'll probably need to reinstall the magisk root app via twrp like we did
before and then after doing that
honestly i was pretty impressed the experience is damn close to a pixel
phone but we can still go further
the ruthless pixel launcher from the xda Labs app store is almost a perfect copy
of the pixel 3 launcher and with a little tweaking can be made basically
indistinguishable from the real thing as for the fancy pixel 3 live wallpapers
well those can be had simply by downloading google wallpapers from the
play store as well as a third-party wallpaper pack app that we have linked
in the video description and bam
from the front this thing might as well be the same damn
phone save for the difference between the ips screen of the pocophone and the
OLED on the pixel as for from the back well the
pocophone's kevlar finish actually feels pretty good and non-slippery in the hand
but it doesn't look amazing to my eye but then the pixel 3 doesn't look great from this
side anyway so it's not like you're really missing much we both got the
fingerprint scanner back there as for the camera by default the poco f1 has a
pretty crap camera to be frank but
with the ported google camera app from the pixel phone which you can install
via the link in the video description it's it's really simple
it can actually hang with the big guns colors tend to be a little over
saturated with slightly lower sharpness compared to the pixel 3 xl but
surprisingly in portrait mode it actually has better edge detection
likely thanks to the second rear camera
so in a nutshell there are some caveats here uh there's
the time investment into flashing your device the ir face unlock camera doesn't
yet work on lineage os and there's the possibility of voiding your warranty
but this thing is really great for 300
like really great to put that price in perspective everyone was losing their
when oneplus launched the oneplus one for 300
and that was four years ago since then inflation has gone up and
phone prices in general have absolutely skyrocketed so in today's terms
you could literally buy a pack of these for your whole family for the price of a
single iphone 10s pixel 3 xl or note 9.
think about that so thanks for watching guys this video
was a little unusual for us so if you liked it hit the like button get
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
we're gonna have a lot of links in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like
this one and our community forum which you should totally join
look at that it's all like pixely and stuff you know
look at that