How do I root my FP4?

Using /e/OS
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1

I have an Fairphone 4 which is currently running e/ OS. I did not installed e/ OS myself. I bought it from the Murena shop, so it came with installed e/ OS.

I now want to root my FP4, to run some apps that require a rooted device such as AFWall+ and AdAway. After reading “Does /e/ OS allow rooting or can apps that require root be used? (Link1)” and some other information, I decided rooting with Magisk.

I searched the e/ forum and found this post (Link 2) which forwarded me to an instruction (Link 3) how to root a Fairphone 4, which goes back to this post (Link 4) in the Fairphone forum. (I assumed that this also applies to my phone.) I have installed adb & fastboot on my computer (Windows 10).

Here is what I have done so far. I successfully unlocked the phones bootloader. I downloaded the Magisk app .apk with my computer. Transferred it to my phone. Installed it and opened it on my phone. Downloaded the boot.img from the link that was the same in both instructions. Transferred the boot.img to my phone (downloads). Opened the Magisk app on my phone and patched the boot.img (Install → Selected boot.img). Now I went to my phones downloads folder and found two .img files. One seemed to be the original boot.img and the other was named something like patched_boot.img. However the size of patched_boot.img was 0 bytes. I retried the step “patching with Magisk”. Nothing changed.

Next step of the instruction would have been to transfer the patched_boot.img back to the computer, and run “fastboot boot patched_boot.img” from the computer while the phone is in bootloader. But I stopped after (unsuccessfully?) patching the boot.img.

So here are my questions:

  • Is the described method (Link 3) in general a feasible way to root my phone?
  • If no, how should I do it?
  • If yes, what did I do wrong?
  • Can I use the boot.img (Link 5) I found?
  • What difference does the OS make while rooting?

Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions or questions please comment. I’d be happy if someone could help me.

Because new users are not allowed to put more than two links in a post here the links. Sorry that you can not klick them.
1: xhttps://doc.e.foundation/support-topics/support#does-e-os-allow-rooting-or-can-apps-that-require-root-be-used
2: xhttps://community.e.foundation/t/rooting-fp4-e-os-with-magisk/38017
3: xhttps://forum.xda-developers.com/t/fairphone-4-root.4376421/
4: xhttps://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp4-root-access-is-possible-maybe-a-bit-risky/76839/43
5: xhttps://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-source/FP4/A.067-boot.img

2

Take the original boot.img from /e/fp4.zip

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3

Thanks,

but I cant find it.

4

Install /e/ on a Fairphone FP4 - “FP4”

/e/ image ROM download

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5

I downloaded it (took the lower IMG since it was more similar to my phones build number). Extracted the .zip. Copied the boot.img to my phone. Patched with Magisk, but the patched_boot.img is again 0 bytes. This can not be correct?!

6

Not my device, but you might check out this thread?

7

make sure you’ve updated /e/ to the latest version available. an older build had some memory issues which, among other problems, would crash Magisk when trying to patch the boot.img

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