Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

Android Pay now refuses to play ball on a rooted handset

Google's crackdown on rooted Android devices continues. Citing security reasons, Google doesn’t want rooted 'Droid phones to use mobile payments via the Android Pay infrastructure.

This is a standard not required by Pay’s predecessor, the now-deprecated Google Wallet.

In turn, this has led to a cat-and-mouse game with Android’s substantial global enthusiast community. Now a door that modders opened slightly a few months ago has been slammed shut.

A developer last year found a way of rooting Android without disturbing the /system partition (aka “systemless root”).

A Google engineer acknowledged last year that if it had to scan and verify every file on the partition, the phone would be “bogged down for tens of minutes”.

Respite was temporary. Systemless rooting will now fail to fulfil an Android Pay transaction. Pay now introduces an additional check, performed by Android’s SafetyNet framework.

This post at XDA Developers explains that several further tweaks are required to work around the latest security check.

One Android enthusiast's suggested workaround sounds eminently sensible to us.®