MIUI 13 updates are bricking Mi 11, Mi 11 Ultra, Mi 11 Lite 5G units

Over the past few years, Xiaomi has earned a reputation for problematic OS upgrade rollouts. The company has slowly been rolling out MIUI 13 along with Android 12 to a number of its devices and it appears the MIUI 13 update may have some disastrous consequences to certain phones. 

As reported by Xiaomiui, the Android 12-based MIUI 13 update appears to be bricking several devices. So far, this looks to hold true for the Mi 11, Mi 11 Ultra, Mi 11 Lite 5G, and likely other Mi 11 devices that have received MIUI 13. The updates referred to here are non-China ROM builds as well.

The technical cause is unknown and Xiaomi is yet to acknowledge the issue but this appears to happen after installing the OTA with the Updater app. This leads to a full brick, requiring EDL flashing to fix. Supposedly, though, flashing the update package with Fastboot seems to work fine without any issues.

It's unclear if these problematic updates are Mi Pilot builds, however, as that would rid Xiaomi of most of the blame. Joining the Mi Pilot beta-testing program requires users to accept the possibility of situations like this arising after all.

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