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Which Android phones can safely be rooted these days, if any? Everytime one of my friends says they rooted their phone, I ask them how. And the answer is alway

by TekMol 6y ago

Which Android phones can safely be rooted these days, if any? Everytime one of my friends says they rooted their phone, I ask them how. And the answer is always "I was on some website, downloaded some binary and executed it". So as I understand it, they make themselfes completely vurnurable to somebody from the internet who made that root binary.

jasonjayr 6y ago
My Motorola MotoZ has a process that involves loading some token generated from motorolas site using the standard ADB tools.
pgo 6y ago
The rooting process is actually very standardized. On most of the phones you just have to patch a su manager tool called Magisk[1]. Its open-source and been under a lot of eyes.Also the dev works at apple and is a community favorite. Custom roms are a lot more risky, there are 100s of different flavors made by relatively unknown developers and even though they are technically open source, I find it highly unlikely that none of them contain malware. I mean you can introduce a memory corruption bug in few handful characters, these custom roms are practically unauditable. 1. https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Custom roms are a lot more risky, there are 100s of different flavors made by relatively unknown developers and even though they are technically open source, I find it highly unlikely that none of them contain malware. I mean you can introduce a memory corruption bug in less than few characters, these custom roms are practically unauditable. Depending on your phone and threat model, it's not obvious that this is worse than the alternative. Given that there have been phone manufacturers that outright shipped malware, and most phones stop getting security patches after a few months and then steadily accrue CVEs, it may be better to chance a 3rd-party ROM.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Echoing sibling comment: AFAIK, all Motorola Moto series phones officially support unlocking the bootloader (with a minor dance to register and get an unlock code from Motorola), which you do with adb, after which you just use adb/fastboot to rewrite recovery (or just directly boot an alternate recovery, which you can do without flashing it) and then you can flash a custom ROM and/or Magisk, the rooting solution of choice.
the_pwner224 6y ago
A number of phones have official support for LineageOS (popular FOSS custom OS very close to stock FOSS Android), in which case installing the OS is a simple and straightforward process with no extra binaries required except those published by the LineageOS project. It's very common to also use the TWRP recovery but actually the process is a bit easier with the official LOS recovery. After that root is provided with Magisk, which is also open source. And you could also install the Google software package if you want at this stage to get Play Store / etc. Plus, with LOS you get guaranteed security & version updates for Android for years and years and years. Unfortunately firmware blobs for the hardware are provided by the OEM, and while LOS tries to keep them updated sometimes they are a bit old, and updates for those will eventually end when the OEM stops providing updates.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Almost all of them. The code for actually unlocking the bootloader is generally open or at least described, and you basically just need to flash TWRP then Magisk which you can both compile.
neurostimulant 6y ago
If you intent to purchase a phone for the purpose of installing custom rom on it, you might want to get a phone with a snapdragon chip. Other chips such as mediatek often has increased risk of bricking when you mess something up, and thus not many rom developers are willing to tinker with those phones, which means less variety of custom roms available for those phone models.

by TekMol 6y ago

jasonjayr 6y ago

My Motorola MotoZ has a process that involves loading some token generated from motorolas site using the standard ADB tools.

pgo 6y ago

The rooting process is actually very standardized. On most of the phones you just have to patch a su manager tool called Magisk[1]. Its open-source and been under a lot of eyes.Also the dev works at apple and is a community favorite. Custom roms are a lot more risky, there are 100s of different flavors made by relatively unknown developers and even though they are technically open source, I find it highly unlikely that none of them contain malware. I mean you can introduce a memory corruption bug in few handful characters, these custom roms are practically unauditable. 1. https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Custom roms are a lot more risky, there are 100s of different flavors made by relatively unknown developers and even though they are technically open source, I find it highly unlikely that none of them contain malware. I mean you can introduce a memory corruption bug in less than few characters, these custom roms are practically unauditable. Depending on your phone and threat model, it's not obvious that this is worse than the alternative. Given that there have been phone manufacturers that outright shipped malware, and most phones stop getting security patches after a few months and then steadily accrue CVEs, it may be better to chance a 3rd-party ROM.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

Echoing sibling comment: AFAIK, all Motorola Moto series phones officially support unlocking the bootloader (with a minor dance to register and get an unlock code from Motorola), which you do with adb, after which you just use adb/fastboot to rewrite recovery (or just directly boot an alternate recovery, which you can do without flashing it) and then you can flash a custom ROM and/or Magisk, the rooting solution of choice.

the_pwner224 6y ago

A number of phones have official support for LineageOS (popular FOSS custom OS very close to stock FOSS Android), in which case installing the OS is a simple and straightforward process with no extra binaries required except those published by the LineageOS project. It's very common to also use the TWRP recovery but actually the process is a bit easier with the official LOS recovery. After that root is provided with Magisk, which is also open source. And you could also install the Google software package if you want at this stage to get Play Store / etc. Plus, with LOS you get guaranteed security & version updates for Android for years and years and years. Unfortunately firmware blobs for the hardware are provided by the OEM, and while LOS tries to keep them updated sometimes they are a bit old, and updates for those will eventually end when the OEM stops providing updates.

sudosysgen 6y ago

Almost all of them. The code for actually unlocking the bootloader is generally open or at least described, and you basically just need to flash TWRP then Magisk which you can both compile.

neurostimulant 6y ago

If you intent to purchase a phone for the purpose of installing custom rom on it, you might want to get a phone with a snapdragon chip. Other chips such as mediatek often has increased risk of bricking when you mess something up, and thus not many rom developers are willing to tinker with those phones, which means less variety of custom roms available for those phone models.