google-pixel_su
It was only five days ago that I pondered the question here whether root access on the Pixel phones would be attainable. Despite what appeared to be an insurmountable number of hurdles to jump and hoops to leap through I was confident that it would be possible in the end. I concluded that I had “no doubt that these guys, or some other enterprising developers, will eventually figure it out.” Well it seems I was right, and quicker than I expected.

Just a matter of a few hours ago, renowned hacker and developer Chainfire XDA posted to his Twitter feed with no words except the hashtag “pixel” but had attached a picture. The picture shows an installed SuperSU asking for permission to allow a root access request, demonstrating that the device had in fact been rooted.

Unfortunately, for those who want Android Pay (and other apps that require a phone to NOT be rooted) while also having root access the root method requires DM-verity to be disabled and for the system partition to be modified. This is the old school way of obtaining root access. On Lollipop more elegant forms of root which did not disable DM-verity and were systemless were eventually possible. Chainfire XDA said in a followup tweet tonight that he will be continuing his work to get root working without the requirements of DM-verity disabled and a modified system partition.

For those who still like to have root access on their devices this is great news, especially with the TeamWin custom recovery also well on the way to being finished. Stay tuned to Ausdroid for future updates on this and to see how our resident hackery guinea pig (me) goes trying out these modifications.

***UPDATE*** Victory. Chainfire XDA has now achieved what we were hoping he could. With the system fully intact and DM-verity switchable, apps such as Android Pay should still be able to be used.

Do you still root your phones? Why? Why not?

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mike shwilly

Nougat is so mature i can’t think of anything worth rooting for anymore

Jonah Aragon

AdAway and TitaniumBackup are probably the only things I still want. Current cloud app backups are so slow/unreliable still, hopefully that’ll be the next thing Google solves.

Alex Kelly

reminding me of old iPhone days, where people could figure out how to jailbreak, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle anymore.
It’s a shame really, I didn’t expect Google to pull a complete Apple.

rexiburns

I didn’t expect it either smh. I used to brag to iOS owners about such

Alex Kelly

It’s actually made me start thinking about buying an iPhone… I won’t as I can’t stand the ecosystem but for the same price, Apple has way better features. Better apps, battery life, speakers, phone design, cameras (imo), 3d touch, IP68…

rexiburns

Mr. CHAIN is definitely the man. Dude has some serious skills. I thought the new nougat had all these checks that made rooting impossible lol. When I read that I knew someone would take the challenge.

Christopher Evert

One of the reasons I went to a Nexus 5x was to avoid most of my prior basis for rooting my phone. That, and the ability to try Google Fi as my carrier, were the redeeming graces for otherwise having zero upgrade candidates from my Galaxy S5 (which was shock-damping, signal-transparent plastic, and accordingly had wireless charging. Also was waterproof, had a swappable battery for my long work travel engagements, and swappable SD card storage – also great for work travel. The Pixel has so few of these, it looks like I’m going to have to jump off of Google… Read more »