T-Mobile LG V30 has been rooted, but the procedure is risky

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LG Mobile has been losing millions of dollars every year and the way they are locking down certain carrier devices isn’t helping them when it comes to the enthusiast crowd. Older LG devices sold at wireless carriers in the United States were locked down like normal, but the T-Mobile variants had bootloaders that were easy to unlock. This stopped with the T-Mobile LG G5. While you could unlock the bootloader and boot into fastboot mode, none of the commands worked that let you install TWRP for root and custom ROM purposes. One developer community member has worked hard to keep this possible and their latest work shows us how to gain root access to the T-Mobile LG V30.

Fans of T-Mobile LG smartphones may recognize XDA Recognized Developer as they were able to bypass this restriction with the T-Mobile LG G6 earlier this year. The developer is at it again this month with a method for the T-Mobile LG V30 (H932) that will walk you through getting working LAF on the phone, which then allows you to install TWRP on the device, and then ends it by showing you how to get Magisk installed so that you have full root access to the T-Mobile variant of the LG V30.

As we mentioned in the title, this process is risky and it could end up hard bricking your smartphone if you don’t follow the steps exactly as described. If you try this method on any model of the LG V30 other than the H932, then you will end up causing your smartphone to bootloop. As far as we know, this specific bootloop on non-H932 LG V30 variants is permanent because you will have wiped out download mode and there’s no way of getting it back. Still, the process is risky for the H932 as well but thankfully runningnak3d has been nice enough to break it down into multiple step-by-step guides. This starts by downgrading your firmware to v10d and ends with flashing Magisk so that you have root access.

Besides the work that runningnak3d has done, they also give credit to Lekensteyn for the work they did on the LG G2 and LG G3. XDA Recognized Developer steadfasterX is thanked for adding features, testing crazy ideas, FWUL, and more. tuxuser helped runningnak3d improve their knowledge in Python and finally, thanks was given to XDA Member smitel for the original reverse engineering of LG UP.

Again, just careful when following the instructions linked below. Be sure to read through the whole tutorial from start to finish before you even begin doing anything as there were many bricked LG G6 devices from a similar method earlier this year. runningnak3d does assure us that they “have upgraded to Oreo, and then downgraded to 10d and tested this 4 times” so they know the process works, but “getting H933 laf onto your phone is dangerous” so please pay attention to what you’re doing.

Check out this risky root method in our LG V30 forum