Running an app with root permission in Android

tuan picture tuan · Apr 22, 2011 · Viewed 8.1k times · Source

Do you know how to run an app in Android with root permission? I used the following snippet but the root permission is only granted to generated process, not the app itself.

process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("su")

Answer

Chris Stratton picture Chris Stratton · May 1, 2011

You can't really, at least not without some kind of horrible hack.

You cannot make an existing process root, it must be that way from its creation.

Android applications run inside a Dalvik machine in a process that's forked off of a process called Zygote which maps a lot of system libraries into memory, so it's children inherit shared copies. You'd have to somehow modify zygote to tell it to leave the newly forked child root, instead of downgrading it to an application user.