Nexus 7: re-rooting Android 4.3

Tuesday, 30 July, 2013

So Android 4.3 has landed with a slew of minor updates that create more than the sum of the parts. The headline feature is restricted profiles - aka restrict what user profiles can access. I can see this being particularly useful for schools offering limited access out of the box. Whether this can be managed centrally (wait for the 3rd party tools to arrive!) remains to be seen, but its a great feature and adds a good grown up enterprise feature.

Of course, and inevitably, root access is lost and OTA Rootkeeper now no longer works. Those clever people over at Chainfire have updated SuperSU to work on 4.3, however you do need to manually re-root your device. There is a good guide here which includes details on how to manually update your device. In essence, the re-root requires access to the bootloader at which point you can install Chainfire’s updated SuperSU. You can temporarily can bootloader access by installing Goomanager (see this older guide), then reboot to the bootloader and re-root the device.

And my temporary absence of root just reminded what great apps I use that require root:

Stickmount
QuickBoot
ClockSync
AdFree
EsFileExplorer