How to root a Fairphone 3
I own a pretty new smartphone. It’s a Fairphone 3+.
Like many geeks I prefer to have a custom ROM instead of the official Android©.
LineageOS does not officially support the Fairphone 31.
But we can find non-official ROM (I will try to install it and then make another post).
Before installing those kind of ROM (official or not) you must root
your
phone2.
And, all the tutorials I found on the web drives me crazy. But I succeeded. There is how I made it, with more details as possible.
Prerequisites
Install software
Depending of your distribution, search and install adb
and fastboot
utilities.
Unlock the bootloader
You will need to in lock the FP (for Fairphone). For that just read and apply
the official procedure. Just omit the last step, Lock your bootloader
(but remember about it).
Download the official ROM
We will use it and patch it.
Download it from this page, but don’t go futher.
Unzip
With the unzip
tool, decompress the archive:
unzip FP3-xxx-user-fastbootimage.zip
This will result a new directory named after the zip name.
Go inside it with the cd
command:
cd FP3-xxx-user-fastbootimage
You can use the
bash
completion, hitting theTAB
key.
Download and install Magisk
Magisk is the tool which allow us to patch the system to grant root
access.
You just need Magisk manager.
Download it using the android navigator and install it on your FP3.
Launch Magisk Manager
If you launch Magisk manager
, you will see two parts:
- Magisk
- Manager
Magisk part tell that it’s not yet install (and for now it out of business) and the Manager part tell that the manager is installed (of course, you just have launch it!).
Command line operations
Here is the big part.
Upload files to you FP3
First you need to plug the FP3 to your computer.
Be sure the computer see the FP3 with the command:
adb devices
List of devices attached
A209RP9B0201 device
Be sure your device is unlock (schema, fingerprint, etc)
You’re still in the folder resulting of the unzipping official ROM.
With the adb
command again were going to upload the boot.img
file onte to
Download
folder of the FP3:
adb push boot.img /sdcard/Download/.
That’ it for now, time to go back on the phone.
Magisk Manager
again
Launch Magisk Manager
and, in the first part, hitting Installer
. Navigate to
the Download folder and choose boot.img
, then the Go button on the up right of
the screen.
This with patch the boot.img
into a magisk_patched.img
file.
Once it’s done we go back to the command line of your computer.
Get the patched image
We need to download on the computer the magisk_patched.img
file.
With the adb
command, simply pull the file:
adb pull /storage/emulated/0/Download/magisk_patched.img
Boot in bootloader
mode
We need to boot the device into the bootloader
mode (remember with unlock it
at the beginning of the procedure).
adb reboot bootloader
You should have something like this:
Pull the patched image
Back to the computer, we gonna use another command we had installed,fastboot
.
Once we must find the active slot:
fastboot getvar current-slot
current-slot: a
Finished. Total time: 0.001s
Mine is a
but yours could be b
.
Be sure to make it active:
fastboot --set-active=a
Then, it’s time to flash the current boot.img
with the patched one.
fastboot flash boot_a magisk_patched.img
Sending 'boot_a' (20730 KB) OKAY [ 0.938s]
Writing 'boot_a' OKAY [ 0.220s]
Finished. Total time: 1.245s
Adapt the command accord of your active slot
Hum… smell good!
Time to reboot the device.
Simply push to power button or type on your computer:
fastboot reboot
Check
Check in Magisk Manager
, you should see some thing like that:
Sorry the screenshot is in french.
The first part show you that it’s installed and the small icons on the bottom of the screen let you see which applications are root granted.
Disclamer
IN ANY CASE I COULD’T BE RESPONSIBLE OF ANY DEVICE DAMAGE. YOU USE THIS TUTORIAL AND THE SOFTWARE IN YOUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY. IN CASE OF FAILURE, REINSTALL THE DEFAULT OS USING THE FAIRPHONE PROCEDURE.