Last Updated on July 20, 2022 by Mathew Diekhake
The Xiaomi Mi 4i is a brand new smartphone that comes out with Android 5.0 Lollipop with MIUI 6 UI. If you love that as stock, but still prefer installing a custom ROM or checking out all the available root-requiring applications from Google Play then you’ll first need to grant the rooting permissions by following the guide below. The amazing news for Xiaomo fans is that you can unlock the system internals using a One-Click rooting tool below. These are the best kind because they are ultra reliable for the smartphone internal system and they are easy.
Even though One-Click rooting packages are nifty, you still need to take on the same precautions so you don’t lose any data and so you can use them properly. For example, you should still download and install Helium for Android from Google Play.
Details of Note
- You still need to access a computer to use the guide; therefore, you must allow permissions for the USB Debugging Mode. First, you will need to unlock the Developer Options menu if you don’t see it there available from the original Settings menu on your handset. That means tapping over the build number seven times from the About Device menu. That’s the firmware build number you’ll see in the menu. Now you have unlocked the new Dev options menu which you will find available from the Settings. Now enter the Developer Options menu and enable the USB Debugging Mode. Doing so means you can now connect the Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphone to the computer.
- Speaking of computers, you must make sure it’s a Windows PC only. That means you can use a Surface tablet of any kind, a Windows computer or any other Windows laptop. You cannot use this guide if you are running an Apple Mac or something else.
- Those wishing for further reading on rooting can check out what things to do with a rooted Android and go from there. The list tells you all about what is a custom ROM, what is a custom recovery, how to install the custom ROM, NANDroid backups and more.
- Unfortunately, there’s still no smartphone or tablet cure for voiding the warranty for most devices in the Xiaomi range. You might recall recently another post about Samsung Galaxy S6 and developers making a way you can gain the root access without tripping the Knox security code. You can read that here: Root Samsung Galaxy S6 Without Voiding KNOX with PingPong.
How to Root Xiaomi Mi 4i on Android Lollipop (And Potentially More)
Important: The guide below is now deprecated. You can use the new root toolkit to root the Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphone instead.
1. Download the –4i–root–muzisoft-tcl-mmd3S-root-20150524.exe file.
2. Once you click the button, the 10 MB file will continue to download directly above the desktop.
3. Click the small right arrow on the right side of that file sitting above the taskbar and shift the contents over to the desktop.
4. Now you will need to setup Android SDK and ADB on Windows PC if you don’t have it already. Those with ADB can use the one they already have.
5. Run the tooting tool on the desktop and wait for it to load.
6. Completely Power off and plug the Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphone into the same PC as the ADB and rooting tool.
7. Now the rooting tool will show you a command prompt. The writing’s in Chinese so English readers will need to look out for the command line only.
8. In the command line, type the number 1 and hit enter on your keyboards.
9. The Xiaomi Mi 4i handset will now reboot to Bootloader Mode.
10. Unplug the Mi handset from the computer and plug it in again and you’ll get a new Android blue screen — don’t worry, it’s not like the Windows blue screen of death.
11. Now wait while the rooting exploit automatically finishes the job.
The rooting exploit automatically flashes the SuperSU to your device and it will be complete.
Understand that future OTA updates might patch the current exploit even though sites are claiming that this guide works for all firmware and software versions. We’ll never know until Google decides to patch it or not. For now ,though, this definitely works on the latest OTA update running Android Lollipop. You can check yours is working by installing the root checker app from Google Play.