Hi, thank you in advance for reading and for any help that you can give.

I'm not new to XDA, I've been here for more than 10 years, but I'm new to Asus phones, recently I got an Rog Phone 5s, I repair and sell used phones, this is the third one I buy to resell and they caught my eye last time but this is the first one I actually wanted to keep, anyways, I noticed the tencent logo on the back and I searched for a little bit and found out about the different versions of it, then I saw the error message about the mismatched country/firmware thing.
My phone is stuck on Android 11, I buy phones from recycling companies so it's impossible to know the previous owner, but the guy performed a CN to WW conversion and relocked the bootloader but maybe he forgot to change something and now the phone won't do a manual update, I already downloaded the previous 2 firmware files from the Asus website, i place the files on the internal storage, restart, the notification pops up but inmediately fails.

I have already tried to flash the firmware via bootloader but as the bootloader is locked, the update also fails.

Is there any other way to update the phone?
Or to unlock the bootloader?
I'm very familiar with using adb, fastboot and with the EDL mode, I've seen some threads here about flashing raw firmware and EDL mode but they are kinda old, I want to install android 13, so, I don't know how useful those old tutorials are.
Thanks in advance

I'm still looking for an answer, I already tried to run other updates, aside from the latest ones that are listed on Asus website, I saw some post's where they said that I had to downgrade or update to a certain version to overcome the "update failed" error but the error still shows up, I also downloaded the CN firmware but the update notification doesn't show up at all with this firmware.
I am tempted to try the EDL method but as I said, given that the post's about it are fairly old, I don't know how useful that firmware will be.

I finally managed to solve my problem and i'll leave the answer for future requests.

I found the post that im quoting in the end with a link to a RAW Android 12 firmware, i just put the phone on fastboot mode and ran the "flash_raw_and_wipe_data" script, it started flashing without problems and voila, all done.
After that i downloaded the latest firmware from Asus website, placed it on the root of the storage, restarted the phone and now the update started without errors and i now have Android 13 and the annoying message about the Firmware/Country mismatch is gone.

AnonymousJoker365 said:

Here is a link to the most recent RAW firmware for ROG 5s i could find, if you get an error saying too many people have downloaded the file just login to your google account to bypass it. The file name is: WW-ZS676KS-31.0810.1226.84-REL-2205-M3.13.24.66-ASUS_1.1.145-Phone-user-20220512.raw.rar (i think its android 12)


Link:https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1sZieg1QodJeSqNDnWlzRFeulEdm7GoQ1&export=download

Jc_master said:

I finally managed to solve my problem and i'll leave the answer for future requests.

I found the post that im quoting in the end with a link to a RAW Android 12 firmware, i just put the phone on fastboot mode and ran the "flash_raw_and_wipe_data" script, it started flashing without problems and voila, all done.
After that i downloaded the latest firmware from Asus website, placed it on the root of the storage, restarted the phone and now the update started without errors and i now have Android 13 and the annoying message about the Firmware/Country mismatch is gone.

Hey , will this work for downgrade from 13 to 12?
I recently updated my device to Android 13 (33.0210.0210.221) and locked the bootloader, now I am unable to unlock the bootloader with unlock tool.
I want to try to downgrade and unlock the bootloader again.
Thanks

rajkumarsoni said:

Hey , will this work for downgrade from 13 to 12?
I recently updated my device to Android 13 (33.0210.0210.221) and locked the bootloader, now I am unable to unlock the bootloader with unlock tool.
I want to try to downgrade and unlock the bootloader again.
Thanks

It may work, in other posts i have seen that you can downgrade simply by putting the android 12 update file from asus website on the root of your phones storage so it seems that Asus does not use anti-rollback safety features like other vendors like samsung with their binary or "bit" system or LG, so this method may work, im not sure if you can find the full android 12 firmware on asus website anymore, but this raw firmware may work