Mi A2 August 2019 update rolling out with screen rotation bugfix & improved cell reception

The third generation Android One lineup from Xiaomi is already here, and it is going to come to India very soon. Built on the foundation of older Mi A series phones, A3 should face a warm welcome (besides the obvious backslash related to mediocre display).

But what about the truckload of issues with one of its ancestors, i.e. Mi A2?

Sporting a Snapdragon 660 SoC and a highly capable dual camera, 2018’s Mi A2 seemed nice on paper. But a smaller battery than its predecessor and the omission of the headphone jack made things complicated.

Moreover, the sluggish eMMC performance almost ruined the day-to-day usage experience of Mi A2 owners. Xiaomi started to put excessive delays while releasing monthly updates, and a bunch of phones actually got bricked back in January due to a faulty OTA.

Xiaomi mi a2 january update fused my phone

I just updated my mi a2 and now doest not turn on, just says android on screen and never turn on. Thanks xiaomi and google for fucked up my new phone with your updates that besides dont fix anything, melt devices.

Even fastboot and recovery mode is freezed.

Dont know what the hell are they doing, how they did to make a single update destroys my phone.

(Source)

Literally a similar show of irresponsibility was experienced last month, when Xiaomi ‘accidentally’ broke the double tap to wake (DT2W) and rotation features of Mi A2. Moreover, the July software build (10.0.12.0) was never published as a downloadable package on their update servers.

Regional Xiaomi forum moderators sparsely acknowledged the existence of these showstopper bugs, but the company did not provide any further details regarding the fix. Well, a new build is now rolling out to select Mi A2 owners which could be the key to these puzzles.

The version number of this new build is 10.0.13.0 which is available as both incremental (~105 MB if July patch is already installed) and full sized OTA. Besides August security patches, Xiaomi engineers apparently found the root cause behind the rotation bug and silently fixed that.

August 2019 security update is out, ~ 100 MB.

Fixed the animation bug when moved into landscape mode.

Auto-brightness bug (never lower than 19% brightness) not fixed.

(Source)

So far I’m seeing a few improvements, speed is back up, the battery life has also increased back, the bug from switching to landscape is fixed and I’m still checking for any other fixes.

(Source)

There is a new modem firmware in this update as well. According to some Mi A2 owners over 4PDA, the new baseband performs significantly better in the domains like maintaining steady cellular network strength.

PiunikaWeb is still gathering feedback related to other hidden fixes in this update. We are not sure if the double tap to wake option is restored or not due to the scarcity of users having the August update on Mi A2 at this moment.

The download link of the full update package can be found below:

• Device: Mi A2
• Codename: jasmine
• Channel: Global Stable
• Version: V10.0.13.0.PDIMIXM
• Android: 9.0
  • Type: Recovery
    • Download: Link
    • MD5: b1d08ca14dd3b3cb1ae8f290839fe915

I like to thank my friend yshalsager and the Xiaomi Firmware Updater project for tracking the OTA update URLs.

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