[Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact Guides, News, & Discussion] MedGenius:
So I bought a new phone since my old Onyx (One+ X) died (cracked screen and charging port is getting iffy). And finally I decided on this one, a cheap Chinese docomo branded one off Ebay.

I was so exited when it arrived, the UPS truck was at my gate when I got home that day, ready to leave, but the driver was nice enough to wait and give me my package then and there. Pheew.

Well, now to my, bootloader unlocking, recovery flashing, after market os installation and rooting story...

Bootloader:

The phone was supposed to be unlocked, and I guess that only meant SIM unlocked, because the service menu read "Bootloader unlock allowed: no". Damn.

A few Duckduckgo searches later, turned up I needed the "S!Unlock tool" which I found a copy off online, but username/password fields needed to be filled in, and I think I found a pirated s/n which didn't seem to work, (might have if I had tried harder).

But since it was just over £22 at https://networkunlocking.com/ I thought I could spare that on the off chance it worked. I was very surprised when it finally did, truth, I needed a few tries. And it actually did turn that service menu's pesky "no" to a thumbs-up "yes". Yay!

So now, pulling the cable, holding "volume up" and inserting cable for that blue light goodness, and running the "flashtool.exe -i 0x???? oem unlock bootloader 0x????????????" comand.

Not so fast, that doesnät work with newer flashtool versions...

Finding the old one from my Xperia Arc days and runnning it again, Yay!

(Wish I had read ahead and done that temporary root trick to rip my DRM codes off my phone first. But I don't plan to revert to stock, and I gather (might be wrong) that the DRM is only needed for stock roms, and not Lineage OS and such.)

Recovery (TWRP):

Now the problems start for real, getting into recovery was a **** and a half. Most guides for the phone says to push "volume up" multiple times during the boot-process. This turns out to be plain wrong. The actual button combo is holding "volume down" and "power" button together atleast until the screen goes blank after the unlocked bootloader warning.

Now, I wanted 17.1 on the phone and the recommended TWRp is 3.1.1 or something, and this works to install lineage fine, but don't forget to erase /data partition as I did. Stupid mistake that made wifi fail miserably, and probably a lot of other stuff, that I never tried before noticing my mistake.

However trying to get my own set of ringtones on the phone turned out to be another issue, going back into recovery when I noticed my ringtone.zip had failed. Obviously the media folder had moved since los 15.1,so no wonder right? Turns out it wasn't the only problem. TWRP 3.1.1 (or something) failed to unencrypt the root partition, so changing anything via recovery was a lie. fortunately the latest recovery, 3.5.2_9 did. So after installing that everything was rosy peaches.

Rooting:

SuperSU? forget it.

Magisk? yeah, but how? No really good step by step guide out there, except download from the github page, but what version?

A little trial and error, tried with the arm64 version and it turned out to be the right one. (Sometimes you just get it right on the first try...)

Renamed the apk to .zip put it on the phones memory, entered recovery and installed the zip, et voi effing la, Magisk root installed.

Root checker verifies root status, TitaniumBackup and RootExplorer works. Yes, my phone is playing ball.

Final notes:

This above looks simple right? In fact this was a two day process since the guides are surely lacking for this phone, a lot of trial and error, the greatesthurdle was getting into Recovery, until I found the right button combo I accidently managed to enter it once making me believe I had the right combo and something was wrong with the phone. 4 hours or so wasted trying different versions rebooting and flashing. Getting back my Viber messages turned out to be a problem to, TitaniumBackup got the messages back, but the db had references to my old images on my old phone, and probable pointed at the wrong directory so trying to send images either from gallery or take new photos crashed the app. Solution, backup the messages to my google account, uninstall and reinstall viber and restore from that backup. TitaniumBAckup is good but no magic bullet, it's a ***** that we have to rely on Google for backups though, I am allergic to the cloud, something about it makes my skin crawl.

Otherwise I like the phone, it says docomo on the back, something I can live with. The Chinese vendor even supplied one glass screen protector for the phone and a clear soft plastic case, in case I wanted some extra protection. I only wish there was a screen protector that had the same surface as the one that was on the phone in the box, that slightly opaque cloudy feel was so nice on my finger.

Can I recommend this phone? Nah, if noone writes a step by step guide that will cut down the time I spent on making this phone palpatable, I can't. But if you, like me, don't mind to tinker and don't want a phablet or spend way too much for the privilege to get a screen size you don't want, then sure. But why do we have to get them from China?