ARB (Anti-RollBack) is a special mechanism that prohibits rolling back to a previous version of the firmware on Xiaomi smartphones. Such a protection system was first added to phones intended for the Chinese and Indian markets. But starting in late 2019-early 2020, all phones began to be equipped with such a security layer.
Let’s look at a simple example to understand better how the mechanism works. Suppose you bought a Mi 10 phone with the default MIUI 11 shell installed. You didn’t like it for some reason, so you decided to roll back to an earlier version of the firmware. All the actions were performed correctly and strictly according to the instructions, but the smartphone stopped launching in the end.
And what to do in this case? The answer – is to try to restore the device in the Xiaomi service center. As you can see, the mechanism works quite strictly. So it’s better not to install firmware versions not originally intended for the phone without need. But if you roll back to the shell installed before the next update, there will be no problems.
To check the phone for ARB, you need to install a special utility Platform Tools on your computer. Then connect the smartphone to the PC via a USB cable and put it into Fastboot mode. It remains to enter into the command line special commands, which are described in detail here.
