Galaxy S8+ Snapdragon Root Access with System R/W Has Been Achieved

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Samsung generally releases two different versions of their flagship smartphones with their own Exynos SoC being used in most global markets and the Snapdragon SoC being used in the United States (and a few other locations). The company is focused on the security of their products, as evidenced by the work they do with KNOX, but it is easy to unlock the bootloader of their devices with the Exynos chipset. This isn’t the case with Snapdragon variants but some developers have announced that root has been achieved on the Galaxy S8+.

For those who haven’t been following along, XDA Senior Member created a thread in the XDA Galaxy S8 forum a couple of months ago. The goal with this thread was to keep track of the current progress of root access for the G950U/G955U Snapdragon smartphones from Samsung (Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+). The thread has gotten to well over 140 pages deep so far but some big news came out of it late last night when XDA Senior Member gave an update on their progress.

This post was to inform the community that the /system partition has been mounted as read/write and that the developer team needs time to package things up. Then a few hours later the same developer made another post that showed SuperSU was installed and running properly with root access to the device. We then found someone on the team who says they have root access on the Galaxy S8+ and that they’re waiting on some files so they can begin work on the Galaxy S8.

From what we can gather, this method was possible thanks to an exploit and this does not mean the bootloader is unlocked in any way; the package and instructions should be released soon, but do not spam the thread asking for an ETA and search your questions ahead of asking them.

Since this does not unlock the bootloader, this means that TWRP or any unsigned images cannot be flashed onto the device (even after it’s been rooted). While this is a bummer for some, the team is also saying this means that KNOX is left intact because of the exploit they’re using.