Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

One of the neatest features of carrying a small Linux computer in your pocket, is that you have a machine to hack everywhere you go 😉

After getting a terminal application installed, you find that most stuff that you want to do require “root access” on your android phone – it appears that on Android they don’t really use “user permissions” but instead each app is its own user id with its own set of permissions (an ingenious way to handle different permissions per application).

To do most interesting things you need to make sure you can get root access. As a normal phone user you aren’t expected to need this so this feature is disabled on phones and to enable access to the root account you need to crack the phone’s security model.

Apparently its very easy to do as someone already packages the system vulnerability exploit in a neat little Android application that you simple install and run!

Get “root” on your Android phone in 3 easy steps

1. Go to system settings and open “Applications” and mark the first checkbox to allow installation of applications from external sources. If you’ve done this already (its the first thing I did on my phone), then good for you – then you only need 2 steps :-).
2. Go to the Universal Androot developer’s web site and install the latest stable version (1.6.1 at the time of this writing). The easiest way is to go to the website from your phone’s browser and just download the APK, though if you have a barcode scanner installed then you can scan the barcode on the site to get the APK.
3. Install the APK you downloaded and run it. You will get a simple screen with the buttons “Root” and “Unroot” – you can figure it out from there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Universal Androot App Offers One-Click Root On A Multitude Of Devices (G1, Nexus One, Droid, Droid X, Hero, X10, Streak, And More) (androidpolice.com)
• The Easiest Method to Root Samsung Galaxy S on Android 2.1 [Video] (ithinkdiff.com)
• Get Root Access to Your Motorola Droid 2 [Android] (lifehacker.com)
• 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Root Your Android Phone (brighthub.com)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 13:03 and is filed under Gadgets, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.