[Sony Xperia 1 IV] mufunyo:
I bought my Xperia 1 IV last week and almost considered returning it at first, because it was overheating a lot the first day. I have sort of a traumatic experience with overheating phones as I had the Z5 which was simply a bad phone with the Snapdragon 810 and insufficient cooling. After some research I read the same thing about the Xperia 1 III, with people saying that the "AI needs to learn" and it will "go away after 2 days". It still gets warm, but I did notice I was overly conscious of it, and since I had my XZ3 around with my SIM inside, I could do some comparisons. The XZ3 has a much smaller hotspot, so when it gets warm, it's only above the camera area on the back, and you don't really feel it holding in your hand. When the 1IV gets warm, the heat is spread along the top half of the back and into the sides so you're much more aware of when it gets warm. So I decided to just keep it, root it and start using it as my daily phone.

The rooting experience was problem free, just like with my XZ3. Grab the unlock code from Sony, use XperiFirm to extract boot.sin, use unSIN to convert to boot.img, do the same with vbmeta.sin, install Magisk, use it to patch boot.img, use fastboot to oem unlock and flash the patched boot.img and unpatched vbmeta.img. Done! I looked at installing a custom recovery, but TWRP doesn't support Android 12 yet, so I'll just have to be careful and not get myself into situations where I need recovery to bail me out of bootloops for now.

What works:

Magisk 25.1

Zygisk

LSPosed 1.8.3

Universal SafetyNet Fix 2.2.1

fbind v2021.12.7

MagiskHide Props Config 6.1.2 (used to hide navbar and enable bluetooth in-band ringing)

G-VisualMod 4.1 (although I removed it again because it didn't do what I wanted)

Modded GCam 8.1.101 A9 GV2a ENG (for Night Sight as the Sony camera app has no equivalent - only issue is clipped highlights turn yellow)

Fluid Navigation Gestures (navbar hide doesn't work but see above for workaround)

YouTube Vanced non-root mode (make sure to set microG to restricted battery mode)

XPrivacyLua 1.31

What doesn't work:

Immersive mode and any apps/mods that claim to enable it

AOSP Mods (crashes SystemUI constantly and most of the mods don't work)

GravityBox (S) (crashes GPS apps like google maps / waze)

MinMinGuard 2.1.1 (shows 0 ads blocked)

YouTube Vanced root mode (YouTube app is too new, can't downgrade)

Another issue I encountered is that Google Maps on my XZ3 has driving mode available, but since this is Android 12, there is a new revamped version of driving mode that is region locked to US/CA/UK/AU. You will get "Driving mode is not yet available in your region" in unsupported regions. The workaround is to sign out from Google Maps, add the Driving Mode shortcut to your home screen, and then sign in again. The shortcut will work even when signed back in.

I really resent not being able to hide the (rather big) status bar and all the OLED burn in consequences of having the status bar visible at all times. The pixel shifting of the status bar icons is also fairly extreme and it really looks ugly when the icons are crooked compared to the rest of the UI. I always had immersive mode enabled on my XZ3 and after 3.5 years of daily use I have zero burn in. If anyone has ideas or suggestions to get immersive mode re-enabled on Android 12, I'd love to hear them.

UPDATE: I managed to hide the status bar with Xposed Edge Pro! I've set up a trigger to hide the status bar when the Xperia Home launcher loses focus and to unhide it when the launcher gains focus. This way, the home screen shows the clock, battery and notifications, but during app use there is no burn in from the status bar. It's basically how I had it set up on my XZ3, although I used Immersive Manager which unfortunately no longer works on Android 11 and higher. The only downside to using Xposed Edge is that you can briefly see the home screen reflowing when the status bar appears. Curiously, you can't see the other apps reflow when the status bar disappears again, even with doubled animation speed.

The phone buzzer is also really strong, to the point where if you have it on a hard surface like a table, it makes a lot of noise vibrating. I tried Vibration Tuner but it hasn't been updated in so long that it doesn't work. Are there any modern alternatives? The haptic feedback is too strong for my liking as well.