[Update: Recovery+China Beta too] First official fastboot package for Mi Play up for grabs

The article has been updated since it was originally published – please scroll to the bottom to access the updated contents.

Xiaomi is famous for their ‘shotgun’ strategy of releasing as many as possible devices for every price segment. Continuing the tradition, they concluded their journey last year by announcing Mi Play on December 24th. Thanks to the contributions of XDA Recognized Developer yshalsager, it is now possible to download the official fastboot firmware package for this phone.

The ‘Play’ moniker is getting popular among Android OEMs. Motorola started using it since 2015’s Moto X Play and later Huawei joined the bandwagon with Honor Play series of phones.

In case of Xiaomi, this China exclusive series is named definitely to target the youth community and students. The vibrant colours, two tone gradients finish, display notch along with thin bezels typical attractive pricing and 10 GB free data per month make Mi Play a lucrative choice for them without any doubt.

Back to the firmware part of the story, Xiaomi is one of those few OEMs who actually care to share the firmware packages with end users. It can be immensely helpful on scenarios like recovering the phone from a brick, rolling back-and-forth to some particular release or doing a clean flash.

Xiaomi is usually little bit slow on updating their download portal, and as of yet Mi Play (codename: lotus) isn’t visible on that page, neither on the device listing of the official forum.

Luckily open source development is here to rescue: Youssif Shaaban Alsager AKA yshalsager has created couple of awesome projects to track Xiaomi firmwares independently. The whole codebase is open sourced, so it can even be possible to run it on your own PC.

As a matter of fact, Xiaomi starts populating their OTA update servers days, even months before official announcement of a particular device. With proper parameters such as the device codename, yshalsager’s tracker is able to spot the appropriate package. As a derivative, we have now our hands on the fastboot firmware package of Mi Play.

The current firmware contains MIUI V10.1.4.0.OFICNXM, based on Android 8.1 which is a rather shameful as almost half of an year passed since the release of Android 9 ‘Pie’ by Google. The package, compiled on 27th December 2018, is a part of China Stable branch and likely to be the same version as the 0-day patch.

An unlocked bootloader is mandatory to flash this package via MiFlash, which comes with Xiaomi’s proprietary adb and fastboot binaries. Though the standard fastboot binary should be able to flash the package, it would be better to stick with MiFlash for compatibility reasons and ease of usage.

As a side note, this is the first device from Xiaomi having MediaTek chipset as well as Project Treble support. So enthusiasts who can order it from China should be able to play with GSIs after unlocking the bootloader, albeit there will be some issues specific to the SoC. The package is also useful to revive the phone after a ‘hard brick’, but you need to fiddle with the cables and/or sort some pins.

Download from firmware package from here. (MD5: e23c9711a2fa0720d2a9a5a35cd113cb)

UPDATE (12th January)

yshalsager tipped us last night and now we have links of corresponding recovery zip. He was also kind enough to provide the goodies from China Beta branch as well that are carrying the version number 9.1.10.

According to the developer, the tracker script was unable to spot them initially due to a small bug which has been fixed already.

As usual, the beta firmware is newer than the stable one and was compiled on January 10th. Hold your horses – it’s still based on Android 8.1. 🙁

Here we go, the download links:

• China Stable Recovery Zip: 10.1.4.0.OFICNXM (MD5: b871b371c83dbb6efdeb8c91343f5723)
• China Beta Fastboot Package: 9.1.10 (MD5: 143c66152c74aa35c374eef09f19d350)
• China Beta Recovery Zip: 9.1.10 (MD5: b0da8614416fa1775b0beda1efd9d2fa)

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