This post was published 10 years, 10 months ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some material it contains may no longer be applicable.
I sure many of you have heard of the term “rooting” when it comes to Android. If you haven’t you may have heard of “Jailbraking” which is the equivalent from the iOS world. In short it means getting a higher level of access to your device so that you can install apps which do things outside of the normal limits of the system or to flash custom ROMs along with many other cool things.
I won’t go into any more detail about what it is or does here as really is not the purpose of this post. You can find out more about root very easily from a few short Google searches. For the remainder of this article I shall assume you know what root is and why you would want it.
Gaining root access on your device can be very challenging and daunting for some users or simply seem like too much effort. Maybe this is the case for you but you’ve still sort of fancied giving it ago? Well now you can enjoy the power and freedoms of a rooted device without the hassle as hacker “Geohot” (who you may have heard of from the PS3 hacking) has just released a new one click root app called “Towelroot” which should root almost any Android device out there with just a single button press!
To use this app you simply download the apk from towelroot.com, install it on your device (you’ll need to allow installing apps from Unknown Sources in security settings first!) run it and the press “make it ra1n”. That’s it. Your device will reboot and if it worked you will be rooted! Generally the worst case should it not work on your device is that your device will reboot and nothing will have happened.
One thing you must do before testing and enjoying root though is to install an Superuser management app for security reasons (to stop any app automatically being granted root access). We recommend SuperSU which you can install from the Play Store using the widget at the bottom of this article. After running SuperSU it will probably ask to update the SU binary. Choose “Yes” and then “Normal”. Now you are ready to start the fun!
If you have a Nexus device you can now use your root access to unlock your bootloader without wiping any data using the app “BootUnlocker for Nexus Devices” which can also be downloaded from the Play Store. A widget for this app can also be found at the bottom of the article.
You can find out more about Towelroot on the official thread over at the XDA-Developer forums: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2783157
Disclaimer: While we are fairly certain this app should be safe, if it causes any damage to your device, murders your kitten or starts a zombie apocalypse, we nor Geohot are responsible. Use of this app is entirely at the risk of the user. You know the drill!
