Install TWRP Recovery on Essential Phone and Root it

Essential phone is finally seeing the light of the day. This phone has been blessed with a TWRP recovery and it’s already rooted. People who were lucky enough to get their hands on this phone can start unleashing the power hidden inside this beast.

The TWRP recovery is the latest one and the phone can be rooted by flashing the popular systemless Magisk interface. We will have a look on the tutorial to install TWRP recovery on Essential Phone and then root it. Before jumping up to the steps to flash TWRP and root Essential Phone, it’s important to throw some light on the features and specs of this phone.

The all-display Essential Phone came out back in August. The phone is crafted beautifully. Especially, the front camera blended inside the display gives this phone amazing look. The placement and style of the rear dual-camera setup is also impressive. Essential Phone has a 5.71-inch display with a resolution of 1312 x 2560 pixels. This phone is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU and a 6GB RAM.

The internal storage is 128GB. It has a 3040 mAh battery under the hood. Essential Phone came out running on Android 7.1.1 Nougat. This phone runs on near-stock Android operating system. The company has also promised swift software updates, but the phone hasn’t been updated to Android Oreo yet. Essential Phone is a combination of powerful hardware and beautiful design.

Now that we have had an idea of this phone, it’s time to move towards what we were here for. Wondering what you are going to do with a custom recovery on your phone? Let’s clear out such questions as well first. With a custom recovery like the TWRP recovery, you can flash ZIP and IMG files on your phone.

Custom ROMs usually come in the form of a ZIP file, custom mods also come in the form of ZIP files. Magisk, which will be used to root the phone, will be also flashed as a ZIP file. Custom recoveries and boot images come in the form of IMG files most of the time.

You can also create a Nandroid backup, also, backup all other partitions of your phone using the Backup feature in TWRP. You can wipe individual partitions of your phone, perform a factory reset without losing internal storage’s data and wipe cache/dalvik cache of your phone. There’s a huge list of tasks that you can perform using a TWRP custom recovery.

In this tutorial, we will first flash the TWRP custom recovery on Essential Phone PH1 and after that we will learn how to root Essential Phone using Magisk.

Install TWRP Recovery on Essential Phone and Root it

Prerequisites

1. This guide is only for the Essential Phone.
2. You must backup all your data because this process may wipe your phone completely.
3. Enable OEM Unlocking and USB Debugging Mode on Essential Phone.
4. You must unlock the bootloader of Essential Phone.
5. Charge your phone up to 50% to make it last through the flashing process.
6. Use original data cable to connect your phone to your PC.
7. Follow this guide carefully. Flashing TWRP and Rooting will void warranty. In case of a mishap, we may not be held responsible. Flash at your own risk.

Required Downloads

1. Download Magisk v14.3 on your computer
2. Download TWRP.img file for Essential Phone.
3. Now, Download modified boot image according to your current build number.
   1. NMJ32F
   2. NMJ20D
4. Download and install Minimal ADB and Fastboot Drivers on your Windows PC.
5. Copy the Magisk.zip, TWRP.img and the modified boot image file to this folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Minimal ADB and Fastboot.

How to Install TWRP Recovery on Essential Phone and Root it now

1. Make sure that you have unlocked bootloader of your Essential Phone.
2. Connect your phone to your computer now.
3. From the desktop of your computer, launch the Minimal ADB and Fastboot.exe command window.
4. In the command window, enter the following commands one by one.
   1. adb devices
   2. adb reboot bootlader
   3. fastboot devices
   4. fastboot flash boot twrp.img
5. While your phone is in fastboot mode, select boot into recovery mode.
6. Your phone will now boot into TWRP recovery.
7. In TWRP recovery, tap Advanced > ADB Sideload.
8. Now in the ADB Sideload command window inside TWRP recovery on your phone, enter the following commands
   1. adb sideload magisk.zip
      1. This will install magisk on your phone.
   2. adb reboot-bootloader
      1. This will reboot yoru phone in fastboot mode again now.
9. Now it’s time to flash the modified boot image. Make sure that you have copied the correct modified boot image into the Minimal ADB and Fastboot folder.
10. Open the command window on your computer again and enter the following command
    1. fastboot flash boot boot.img
11. Reboot your phone now and you should have it rooted with Magisk running on it. That’s all.

Source