As promised, Koushik Dutta has released the first touchscreen-friendly version of his popular ClockworkMod Recovery utility. A public beta is available for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus or Samsung Nexus S smartphones.

Update: Touch Recovery is now available for a number of additional phones.

The custom recovery app allows you to backup or restore your device, wipe data, or flash (install) custom software. Eventually it will likely be available for additional phones and tablets.

In order to ClockworkMod Touch Recovery you’ll need to use fastboot and adb to push the app from your computer to your phone. You may want to install the Android SDK in order to use these tools, although strictly speaking you don’t necessarily need the entire Android SDK if all you want to do is access fastboot and adb.

If you know your way around adb already, you can find some basic instructions for installing the new custom recovery at Droid-Life.

Android developer Koushik Dutta has proposed the creation of a CyanogenMod App Store. It would sort of be like Cydia for Android: a place where users can download apps for rooted Android devices or apps that simply aren’t allowed in the Google Android Market for one reason or another.

Google’s official app store isn’t nearly as restrictive as Apple’s, but apps are regularly pulled from the Android Market for violating Google’s rules – or for running afoul of wireless carriers.

For instance, there are very few video game console emulators left in the Android Market. And Koushik Dutta’s own app for tethering an Android phone to a computer to share a wireless internet connection was recently pulled at AT&T’s request.

While the app store would be named for the popular CyanogenMod open-source Android operating system, it would be available for any custom ROM developers to include in their software. The idea is that it would provide a place for developers to upload free and paid apps which aren’t available in the Android Market — and with over a million active CyangoenMod users, those developers would have a pretty large potential customer base on day one

The app store isn’t a done deal yet, but Koush has already posted a picture of the upload page he’s working on to his Google+ page.

While jailbreaking iOS is the only way to install apps that aren’t available from the official App Store, Google Android is a bit more open. Most phones and tablets running Android let you install apps from “unknown sources” simply by checking a box. But if you want to access settings and files that are normally hidden from users, you’ll need to root your device.

Unfortunately, while a variety of tools have been developed over the last few years that make rooting easy, they tend to become outdated rather quickly. That’s because rooting tools usually rely on exploiting a security hole in the operating system — and once Google is made aware of that hole, there’s a good chance the company is going to try to patch it.

That means, among other things, that if you update your device to run the latest version of Android, you’ll lose root access and you won’t be able to use the same tool to re-root your device.

The good news is that independent developers keep coming up with new methods for rooting — and while some can be rather complex, every now and again someone comes along and packages the tools into an incredibly easy to use package.

And that’s what DooMLoRd’s Easy Rooting Toolkit is.

Here’s how simple it is to root a device with this new utility.

1. Download and unzip the toolkit from the xda-developers forum.
2. Connect your phone or tablet to a Windows PC PC with a USB cable.
3. Double-click the “runme.bat” file that you unzipped.

That’s it. A box will show up on your screen and give you some instructions, some text will fly, and at the end hopefully your device will be rooted, Busybox will be installed, and so will SU.

There is a little more to it. First, this tool only works on a Windows PC. Second, you’ll need to make sure you have adb drivers for your device installed on that PC. And third, you’ll need to enable USB debugging from the Applications\Development settings on your device and “unknown sources| from the Applications settings.

There’s no guaranty that DooMLoRD’s Easy Rooting ToolKit will work on all Android devices, but it’s been confirmed to work on a number of Sony Xperia, Samsung Galaxy, and Motorola devices as well as the Google Nexus One smartphone. I also just tried it out on the Velocity Micro Cruz T408 tablet with Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread and it worked flawlessly.

The toolkit relies on the zergRush exploit — so once Google gets around to patching that exploit you may have to find yet another tool to root your device.

DooMLoRD has also made a tool for unrooting a device — but it only works if you used his toolkit to root in the first place.

via xda-developers

The folks at Swype released a new version of their popular keyboard app for Android last week. It added support for gesture-based shortcuts to copy, cut, or paste text, select all text, create a message in Twitter, or even launch Google Maps using the keyboard.

But there’s a catch: the latest version of Swype only officially supports the Google Nexus S 4G smartphone.

The good news is that hackers swiped a copy of the file, hacked it to work with other devices, and released it to the public. You’ll need to have root access to install the file, as well as a file manager app that can access root system folder and change permissions and a terminal emulator.

In other words, installing the unofficial build of Swype isn’t as simple as simply downloading and running an APK file. But if you’ve been itching to get your hands on the new app and you’re not scared off by AproSamurai’s instructions at the xda-developers forum, you can install the latest build of Swype today.

Update: If you’d rather not use hacked software, you can also now install Swype 3.25 beta on most Android phones. It’s available from the Swype beta website.

via Android Police

One of the most annoying things about using a computer to read data on your Android phone or tablet’s SD card is that in order to mount the card on your computer you have to unmount it from your mobile device. In other words, you can’t copy music, movies, or photos to your phone using a USB cable without temporarily losing the ability to access those apps on your phone or tablet — or to run any apps that happen to be installed on the SD card.

Now there’s a solution that lets you dual mount your SD card so your computer and mobile device can read it at the same time. The app is cleverly called Dual Mount SD Widget, and it simply allows you to place a widget on your home screen which you can tap to dual mount your memory card. You can also go into the settings and tell the app to automatically mount your SD card whenever a USB cable is plugged in and enable an option to rescan the SD card after you unmount so that your phone or tablet will be able to access any media you’ve added.

There’s only one catch: The app requires root access. If you haven’t rooted your device, you won’t be able to use the widget.

Dual Mount SD Widget is available from the Android Market for 99 cents.

via Android Police

Read the rest of this entry »

Netflix finally released an Android app yesterday allowing subscribers to stream thousands of movies and TV shows to their mobile devices. The bad news is that for now only 5 phones are officially supported. The good news? If you have a rooted Android device it’s not that hard to trick the Netflix app into working on your phone.

Bear in mind, there’s a reason Netflix is only supporting 5 phones at the moment. The company has extensively tested those devices to make sure everything is working properly, so you may run into problems running the app on unsupported devices. But if you’re cool with that, you fan find instructions at reddit for changing your phone’s build.prop file to identify itself as a supported phone. This basically tells the Netflix app that it’s safe to run on your device.

Unfortunately this won’t work with all devices. HTC Thunderbolt users, for instance, have reported problems. And there’s no guarantee that the app won’t crash or work improperly.

There are also reports that the Netflix app runs without any modifications on the Droid X and Droid 2.

The only phones that are officially supported for now are the HTC Evo, HTC Incredible, HTC G2, Google Nexus One, and Samsung Nexus S.

It’s only been a few weeks since hackers released the Gingerbreak tool for rooting Android devices running Google Android 2.3.x. But Google has already patched the security flaw that Gingerbreak exploits in order to provide root access.

The good news is that doesn’t mean much at the moment. While the latest Android source code includes the fix, it will likely be a while before phone makers and wireless carriers start pushing the security update to phones.

On the one hand, it’s  kind of annoying to see that Gingerbreak’s life will be limited. But on the other hand, this is actually a good thing. Gingerbreak only works because of a security flaw in the Anroid operating system — one that could theoretically have been exploited by a malicious app which would do more than just grant you root access to your phone.

In the meantime, if you haven’t rooted your phone yet, you might want to check out Gingerbreak before it stops working. If you have a Google Nexus One, you can follow my step by step instructions, which may also work for some other phone models.

via Android Police

A few days ago a new utility was release which makes it possible to root devices running Google Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread without modifying your bootloader. I decided to wait a few days for the kinks to be worked out before trying the new GingerBreak tool, but when I noticed that the developer of SuperOneClick had incorporated the exploit into the latest version of his popular one-click rooting tool I figured I’d take it for a spin.

As it turns out, the kinks aren’t all worked out. SuperOneClick froze on me every time I tried it. But after a bit of trial and error, I did find another way to root my Google Nexus One phone running the stock version of Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread today. Here’s how I did it:

1. Make sure there’s an SD card inserted in your phone that you’re prepared to erase completely. If you only have one SD card, make sure to backup all your data to a PC before starting. If you have a spare SD card, you might want to insert it now.
2. Open your phone’s settings and scroll down to Storage.
3. Click the Erase SD card button to format your SD card and follow the prompts.

Read the rest of this entry »