Running the Android Wear Emulator? Good. Now Root It!

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Earlier this week, Google made some serious waves by announcing its take on wearable computing. While some could argue that the Android Wear platform is a little bit late to the game, its innovative UI, Google Voice Search integration, and rich notification support set the platform apart from the sea of other wearables.

Although Android Wear features a UI that’s radically different from anything we’ve seen thus far, it is based on the same powerful Android underpinnings as Android OS proper. And as such, pretty much all the same things we’re used to on Android apply to Wear as well—including root access.

If you have already loaded the developer preview and gotten the emulator working on your PC, you can now root it as well. This could be useful to test root-only applications that you may be building for Wear, but let’s be honest. The real reason to do this is just because we can.

The root method is courtesy of XDA Senior Members MrBIMC and r3pwn, and it comes in the form of a root-script that must be executed every time you reboot the emulator. It works by remounting the file system, pushing the superuser and busybox binaries, and installing the superuser APK. The root method is available in both Windows .BAT and Unix .sh form.

To get started truly messing around with the Wear emulator, head over to the original thread and get rooted.

[Big thanks to Pavel for the tip!]