How to root a Samsung Galaxy J5 (2016)

Index:

  • The processes

    1. Boot a custom recovery image

    1. Install a special applications

    1. Enjoy the power

  • Installing an alternative OS

Rooting android your first time is a frustrating experience at best. It took me more than necessary to get root privileges on my phone, therefore I am writing a quick guide for my future self when he will need my assistance. This document explains the steps I took to successfully root my android phone.

Note that the process may vary in several ways, mainly depending on the model of the phone you are trying to root. This guide is written specifically for the Samsung Galaxy J5 (2016), however most of the steps should be similar hopefully. It is advised to read this article first before attempting to root your phone.

The process

To root a phone we need something with root privileges to grant us the same status. Of course, stock Android will never let us get even a glimpse of this power for security reasons so we need to find a workaround. The solution is to boot a custom recovery image, which has high privileges, to install some applications with root status. We can leverage this to install a special app that gives permissions to other apps during normal system execution.

To recap, we need to do the following to achieve root:

  1. Boot a custom recovery image

  2. Install a special application

  3. Enjoy the power

Note that you might mess things up and lose all your data, so be prepared. Probably you will also lose your device’s warranty.

You have been warned :-)

1. Boot a custom recovery image

We need to download a custom recovery image for your phone model. There are many good alternatives, I used TWRP and it can be downloaded from the official website. Note that you need to choose the right version based on your phone. I downloaded the .img file, compressed it in a tar archive and renamed it recovery.tar.

wget https://.../something.img
tar -cf something.tar something.img
mv something.img recovery.zip

Now we need to put this into our device. We need to boot into download mode which on my smartphone is VOL_DOWN + HOME + POWER. After this we can interact with the device, I used odin4 (linux version) for this. To check that oding can talk to the device, run odin4 -l and expect some output. If it does not show anything I cannot help you, it is probably a driver problem, good luck, I believe in you, trust in yourself, you are strong. If you get some permission error, you need to set something on your udev, just follow closely the help output and you should be good to go.

Then load the recovery mode with odin4 -a recovery.zip and, IMMEDIATELY after it finishes, you need to boot in recovery mode, which on my phone is done via VOL_UP + HOME + POWER. You need to be QUICK, REALLY QUICK!!! Keep trying until you manage to do this. If everything was successful, you are now greeted with a cool recovery program.

2. Become root

We now need to install something that will make other things root. We can use Magisk, you can download the apk from the official github releases and rename it to a .zip file. We need to send it to the device and we will use adb from the official platform tools. Just extract the archive.

On the device, select advanced -> sideload -> swipe to start sideload. On your pc, run adb sideload app-release.zip, this should install magisk and it should show the installation on the phone. After this finishes, reboot your phone, go to your apps and open Magisk, it may ask to be installed again, just say yes, follow the installation instructions (just tap two buttons), maybe close it and reopen it, reboot and… we are root!

You can check this by installing RootChecker.

3. Enjoy the power

Now that you are root you can do a bunch of cool things like wipe out everything and install gentoo. A more useful thing would be to install an adblocker (I’d suggest adAway) so that you can actually read blogs and news in peace.

Installing an alternative OS

There are plenty of alternatives and variations of Android out there, the only constraint is that they need to support your phone. You could theoretically make your own build but I have no idea how you would resolve drivers. I aplogize for my ignorance, you’ll have to figure it out some day. I found this unofficial build of eOS, hopefully the link still works.

After you have installed the custom recovery media, you can start the sideload just as you did for Makisk in the previous section, and load the downloaded archive. That is really it, you should have a working OS. If the process fails and you cannot boot the OS correctly, you should be able to access the recovery mode on startup assuming that you can turn off your device. In my experience, when the boot broke, I could not power it off so I just removed the battery and rebooted. Unfortunately, you cannot do this in new phones (sight), so you may try to make it discharge until ti powerd off, gook luck.