How to Unlock and Root the Xiaomi Mi 10
The Xiaomi Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro are Xiaomi’s most premium flagship phones of 2020, and they are fantastic devices for the price. Since Xiaomi is fairly friendly with the development community, rooting and modding Xiaomi devices is never very difficult. However, they do have a waiting period for unlocking your bootloader.
In this guide we will walk you through the simple steps of unlocking and rooting your Xiaomi Mi 10 or Mi 10 Pro, and if you encounter any problems, leave a comment!
Requirements
- ADB & Fastboot on your PC (see Appual’s guide “How to Install ADB on Windows”)
- Xiaomi USB drivers
- A Mi account
- Official Mi unlock tool
- Xiaomi Mi 10 firmware that matches your phone
- Magisk Manager
Before proceeding with this guide, make sure the Xiaomi USB drivers are completely installed on your PC. Some users report that Windows and ADB will not recognize their Xiaomi phone, even with the official Xiaomi drivers installed.
This is because Xiaomi drivers do not play nicely with Windows driver signature enforcement. You will need to temporarily disable Windows driver signature enforcement, reinstall the Xiaomi driver software, and then connect your Xiaomi phone to your PC. Then you should toggle between “USB Charging” and “File Transfer (MTP)” modes on your device, as additional drivers will be installed.
If this doesn’t work, you can try downloading the official Mi Flashing Tool and click the button to automatically install drivers for your device.
Unlocking the Xiaomi Mi 10 bootloader
- First enable Developer Options by going to Settings > About Phone > tap MIUI Version 7 times to enable Developer Mode.
- Now go to Settings > Additional Settings > Developer Options > Mi Unlock Status, and apply for an unlock from Xiaomi.
- Hold Volume Down and Power together to reboot into recovery mode, run the MI Unlock Tool on your PC, and connect your phone over USB.
- The unlock tool will say you need to wait 168 hours to (1 week) unlock this device. However, some users report shorter times, it may depend on the age of your Mi account.
- When the time has expired, re-connect your device to MI Unlock Tool in recovery mode, and now it should successfully unlock the phone.
Rooting the Xiaomi Mi 10 with Magisk
- Download the latest official ROM for your device onto your desktop, and make sure you choose the exact firmware of the model you have (Mi 10, Mi 10 Pro, global or Chinese variants).
- Download the latest Magisk version APK from the GitHub repo, and install it on your Mi 10.
- Extract the boot.img file from the firmware archive you downloaded to your desktop, and transfer the boot.img file to your device’s storage.
- Launch the Magisk Manager app, and tap Install > choose to patch the boot.img file you transferred above.
- Transfer the resulting magisk_patched.img file to your desktop, and place it near the fastboot.exe from Mi Unlock Tool folder.
- Reboot your Mi 10 into fastboot recovery mode, and type:
fastboot flash boot magisk_patched.img fastboot reboot
- When the flash process is finished, you can reboot your phone, and verify root status in the Magisk Manager app.
