Is your Xiaomi/ Poco smartphone stuck on the MIUI screen after a reboot? Are you facing issues with your Redmi smartphone being stuck in a boot loop? Trust me, you’re not alone! As I write this article, there are countless reports pouring in on Twitter about similar issues being faced on a range of Poco/Mi/Redmi smartphones. I faced the same issue on my 6-month-old Poco M2 and managed to solve the problem in just a few hours. Read on to find out how.
Update: We have received a call from our friends at Poco India and they have assured us that they are working on a fix.
Poco boot loop issue: The symptoms
Let’s begin with what actually happens before the phone goes into the boot loop screen. In my case, the Poco M2 slowed down to a crawl and wasn’t responding ‘fast enough’ to my inputs. As always, I thought a simple reboot would solve the problem. As I would later find out, that did not happen. Instead, the phone never completed the reboot process and remained stuck on the MIUI splash screen for hours. I took to Twitter and immediately reported the issue.
This was mainly because I faced the same issue on my Mi10i a few months ago. In case of the Mi 10i, however, it was ‘just’ a case of the reboot process taking extremely long (~10 minutes) to complete. And therefore, the phone did eventually manage to function normally (albeit with a lot of bugs). I had no such luck with the Poco M2, and it remained stuck on the MIUI screen for hours.
Steps I tried to fix the issue
Since this was obviously a boot loop issue, I tried getting the phone to boot to recovery (Power + volume up) mode and try rebooting it from there. Nothing changed. I then downloaded the Mi PC Suite in a bid to try and connect the phone to my computer in Fastboot (Power + volume down)mode. That did not work either. I was about to proceed to the last resort – wiping the phone clean from within the recovery mode – but held myself from doing it because the phone still had some data.
How to fix the Poco boot loop issue?
The solution to this issue was pointed out to me by my Twitter friend Maheep Maurya who also happens to be a software engineer/coder. Someone in his family had faced the same issue on their phone, and he identified that the issue was, in fact, caused by a bug with the Poco launcher. Here’s what Maheep suggested I do that fixed the issue for me.
- Make sure the phone in boot loop has an active SIM card installed.
- If not, insert the SIM cad into the phone and reboot it. Wait for a few minutes after it enters the MIUI screen.
- Take another phone and make a call to the phone stuck in boot loop.
- The screen will light up!
- You can now unlock the phone (if it was locked) and then access the menu.
- In my case, I wasn’t able to open the app drawer because the launcher had conked and wasn’t able to get to the Google Play Store.
- Instead, I used Xiaomi’s own App Store and installed another launcher from there.
- Post installation, I made that launcher my default launcher and rebooted the phone again.
- And that’s it! My Poco M2 is now working fine!
As it turns out, the ‘boot loop’ issue on the Poco M2 wasn’t a boot loop issue after all. The bug with Poco launcher simply prevented the phone from transitioning beyond the MIUI splash screen after the reboot. So, what happened was that the phone was already up and running (and therefore, could accept phone calls). Since the phone app was activated after the call was made, I was able to access the other UI elements not connected to the Poco launcher and successfully get my phone back up and running.
Note that this is a solution for this specific issue and will not work on devices that are actually stuck on a boot loop. We do not have an article for those issues yet. Anyway, do let us know of you did manage to fix this issue using the steps mentioned above.
