Last Updated on November 18, 2019 by Mathew Diekhake

If you have a Sony Xperia T3 phone, you are in luck as your phone has both root-access and a custom recovery to help you with installing root-requiring apps and custom ROMs on your phone.

Before you can root your Sony Xperia T3, you need to have a custom recovery installed on it. And that is what you are going to do in the following tutorial. You are going to install PhilZ Custom Recovery on your Xperia T3 so that you can then use it to flash SuperSU to gain root on your phone.

Sony Xperia T3

So, here’s how you can go about doing that:

Files You Need

  1. You must have unlocked the bootloader on your phone before doing this tutorial. If you have not done so yet, please head here and do that first. Then, come back here and continue.
  2. You need to have a computer that runs Windows to do this tutorial.
  3. You should have Sony USB drivers installed on your Windows computer. If they are not already installed, install them first.
  4. This should flash PhilZ CWM based touch recovery on your Xperia T3.
  5. Download PhilZ Recovery to your computer.
  6. Download Fastboot to your computer. It should help you execute commands on your phone.
  7. This only works for the D5102 variant of the phone. Also, you must be running on the firmware version 18.2.A.2.32.

Installing a Custom Recovery on the Sony Xperia T3

  1. Unzip files from both PhilZ Recovery and Fastboot over to your computer by right-clicking on each of them and selecting Extract here.
  2. On your Xperia T3, head to Menu->Settings->About phone and tap on Build number for 7-8 times and it will say you are a developer. When it does, go back to the settings menu.
  3. Tap on Developer options in the Settings menu and checkmark the box for USB debugging. This option must be enabled for the following steps to work.
  4. Plug in your phone to your computer using a USB cable.
  5. Open a Command Prompt Window in the folder where fastboot.exe is located. It is the folder where you have extracted the Fastboot files. To open the CMD window, open the fastboot folder, hold down Shift on your keyboard and right-click anywhere on the screen and select Open command window here.
  6. Type in the following command into the Command Prompt Window and hit Enter:
    adb reboot bootloader
  7. Your phone should reboot into bootloader mode.
  8. Now, type in the following command and hit Enter. This time, replace recovery.img with the real name of the PhilZ Recovery image that you have downloaded to your computer.
    fastboot flash boot recovery.img
  9. Wait for it to install PhilZ Recovery on your phone.
  10. When it’s done installing recovery, reboot your phone using the following command:
    fastboot reboot
  11. Your phone should reboot.
  12. You are done!

Awesome! You now have a custom recovery up and running on your Sony Xperia T3 phone. You can reboot into the newly installed recovery by holding down Volume DOWN and Power buttons together on your phone. The recovery should boot-up on your phone. Read a full explanation and alternate methods, including apps to help you out here: how to boot into custom recovery mode on your Android devices.

Now that you have a recovery running on your phone, head to our how to root the Sony Xperia T3 tutorial to learn how you can gain root access on your phone. Root is really important if you are looking to install root-requiring apps on your phone. So, go ahead and get your phone rooted using our guide.

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