If you’re already rocking a Pixel phone and you’ve been watching the software development scene, then you already know that the team behind the SuperSU and FlashFire tools have already managed to unlock the bootloader of the Verizon and EE models.
Now the Chainfire team is back with yet another great achievement, as they have just release a systemless root method for the Pixel phones. We say “great achievement” since their work was absolutely incredible and the results will greatly help the Android development community do even great things.
The new systemless root method for Pixel phones that Chainfire released and detailed recently, makes the kernel use files in the boot image as the root directory. The kernel inside the Pixel phones usually makes use of files from the system partition since they come with two systems, two boot, and two vendor.
The Chainfire team figured it out a way to simplify the root method by bypassing the kernel’s use of files from the system partition, and although the method isn’t yet 100% working for all devices, there aren’t too many things that need to be fixed.
Updates, OTAs might continue to work on rooted phones
Particularly, Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P devices powered by Android 7.1.1 Nougat developer preview might be affected by some issues. Other problems stem from the fact that the root method changes from full-disk to file-based encryption and that seems to affect some root apps.
Also, it’s unclear whether or not updates and OTAs will continue to work, but we will most certainly find out when the first one will be released.
The release of the systemless root method for Pixel phones is accompanied by a ton of technical details, and while not everyone might understand them, we recommend you go through all of them if you want to apply this method to your phone.
