 The Pocophone F1 is a truly remarkable device. It's got a flagship-tier Snapdragon 845 SoC, a 6.18-inch IPS display, 6 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 Terabad. So we're gonna walk you guys through how you can turn this $300 flagship killer into almost a Pixel 3 XL 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 Pocophone 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 LineageOS, which was founded shortly after Cyanogen Inc's demise by a few of its core developers, has been going strong ever since. LineageOS 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 be a little bit more expensive 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 wanna 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 gonna navigate to About Phone, then click the MIUI version or build number until it says, you are now a developer. If only it were that easy. What this actually does is unlock the developer options that we're gonna 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's a 72 hour waiting period before you can unlock the bootloader. Once your device is registered to your Mi account with the phone number, download the Mi 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 fast boot 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 gonna check if fast boot 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 gonna need to download them separately at the link in the video description. Please note that you must use the ARM64, 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 Rude 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 really simple, it can actually hang with the big guns. Colors tend to be a little oversaturated 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. There's the time investment into flashing your device, the IR face unlock camera doesn't yet work on LineageOS, 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 shit 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 XS, 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, pixel-y and stuff, you know? Woo, look at that!