How do I root my Android phone?
Rooting gives you administrator (“root”) access on your Android phone, roughly what jailbreaking is on an iPhone. It’s what CheatDroid needs to open other apps’ data.
How hard it is depends almost entirely on your phone’s manufacturer, not on you.
How rooting works today
On a current phone it comes down to three steps, and Magisk’s installation guide walks through each of them:
- Unlock the bootloader. Google, OnePlus, Xiaomi and most phones sold unlocked allow it, usually from the developer options plus a command on a computer. Many carrier-locked phones, and some brands, don’t allow it at all, and then there is no root. Unlocking wipes the phone, so back up first.
- Patch your boot image with Magisk. You install the Magisk app, give it your phone’s boot image from the firmware, and it hands back a patched copy.
- Flash the patched image with fastboot from a computer, and restart. The Magisk app then asks you every time an app wants root, CheatDroid included.
One-click root apps relied on security holes that Android closed years ago. On a phone from the last few years they don’t work, whatever their page says.
Find the steps for your model
Search for your exact model plus “unlock bootloader”, and look in the XDA forums, where people with the same phone have written it down. A guide for a different model, even a close one, can leave you with a phone that won’t start.
Five reasons to root
Rooting is useful beyond CheatDroid:
- Remove bloatware. Uninstall the manufacturer apps you never asked for.
- Block ads everywhere. A rooted phone can filter ads for the whole system, not one browser at a time.
- Back up apps with their data. Normal backups skip most of what apps store; with root a backup app gets all of it, so you can restore a game exactly where you left it.
- Keep battery hogs in check. Tools that freeze apps in the background work far better with root.
- Install a custom ROM. A community build of Android can keep an old phone updated long after the manufacturer stopped.
And CheatDroid
With root, CheatDroid opens what every app on your phone stores: preferences, databases, files, a running game’s memory. Without root it still shows you an app’s manifest, permissions and activities.