Magisk for rooted Android phones won’t die as creator works for Google, but will see big changes

Ben Schoon | Aug 29 2021 - 10:26 am PT

Back in May of this year, famed Android developer John Wu announced that he had been hired by Google to be a part of the Android security team. It was then that fans of his project, Magisk, started wondering what would lie in its future given the obvious conflict of interest. This week, Wu has finally provided some definitive answers.

In a post, Wu explains what the future of Magisk will hold now that he has a conflict of interest at Google. The good news? The project definitely isn’t dead. Magisk will continue to be available. Wu says that his continued involvement in the community with be “reviewed with extra scrutiny” by Google.

The biggest change to Magisk going forward will be to MagiskHide. This module for Magisk allows rooted users to hide root from Android apps that stop working when the system has been modified. Wu describes working on this as a “straight up conflict of interest” given he now has access to “almost all Google source code.” However, part of MagiskHide’s infrastructure will remain, as Wu explains.

Users will be able to assign a denylist of processes where Magisk denies further modifications and reverts all changes it had done. Magisk will not spoof/alter/manipulate any non-Magisk related signals or traces to circumvent any device state detection. As a side bonus, having an easy way to revert changes also enables quick development iteration on emulators without the need to reboot or patch emulator images (see scripts/emulator.sh).

Another change will be the loss of an official Magisk repo for modules. The Magisk-Module-Repo will be removed from the Magisk app and moved to Github, where “trusted community members” will take the reins. The app will still allow users to install modules via .zip files. “Zygisk” is also a project Wu has in development.

Zygisk is Magisk in Zygote. This will run parts of Magisk in the zygote process to make Magisk modules even more powerful. This is also a very important part of the philosophy of Magisk “getting out of the way”. When a process is on the aforementioned denylist, Magisk will cleanup the memory space of the process to ensure no modding is applied (P.S.1). Zygisk is still WIP, and more details will come once the implementation is ready for beta testing.

The open-source community also seems to be taking a bigger role in Magisk, as Wu says that the past year has seen “a higher volume of serious external contribution to the core components of Magisk,” which have fixed bugs and expanded device support.