Root without TWRP?

If the title of this post doesn't make any sense then you can go ahead and stop reading now.

For those still here, the few, the free, the control freaks... there's been an interesting development with Android 10 and root, one that potentially removes the requirement of a custom recovery partition.

A custom recovery has, until now, been a critical component of the rooting procedure. My Nexuses and OnePluses of yore were, without fail, rooted by taking the following steps:

1. Unlock the bootloader;
2. flash a custom recovery partition;
3. boot into custom recovery and flash a superuser zip.

Back in the days of the Nexus One my custom recovery of choice was ClockworkMod, eventually supplanted by the TeamWin Recovery Project or TWRP. Unfortunately in its current form TWRP doesn't seem to work with Android 10—if you're interested their official explanation as to why can be read here. Fortunately this hasn't stopped the XDA hive mind from finding another way.

After poring through forty-plus pages of this XDA thread, I think I've got the gist of it; these steps seem to work for the latest OnePlus and Pixel devices:

1. Download a factory image for your device;
2. extract boot.img from payload.bin*;
3. transfer boot.img to your Android device;
4. use Magisk Manager to root boot.img (via "Select and Patch File" command):



5. reboot device to bootloader;
6. use fastboot to boot device into rooted boot.img;
7. install Magisk via OS;
8. reboot and enjoy root!

* Extracting an image from a binary file is no trivial thing; as a less-secure alternative you can use a modified boot image posted to that same XDA thread.

To keep root after an OTA update follow these steps:

1. Download update but do not reboot;
2. use Magisk Manager to root inactive slot:



3. reboot (into inactive slot) and continue to enjoy root!

I'll be attempting all of the above when I get my OnePlus 7T in the next couple of weeks. So yes, this is a tutorial for myself—which I'm posting here for the benefit of anyone else who may need it.

Source: XDA

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Andrew Currie has been blogging about mobile phones since 2001, smartphones (depending on how you define them) since 2002 and smartwatches since 2014.
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