Rooting an S-OFF stock M9 Marshmallow is significantly easier than I expected
I forgot what a wonder it is to be S-OFF (no, there’s no free way to do this that I know of, you have to plunk down some money for Sunshine.) Mostly in the past I’ve only thought of S-OFF as a tool to switch firmwares back and forth and as something that would give you the ability to downgrade. I was slightly nearsighted in my beliefs as I really haven’t had much of a need for it the past couple of years until today.
I’d updated to Marshmallow this weekend, and I kept having little things that annoyed me such as pages not loading very fast and scrolling slowly in Chrome, a dumbed-down non-root CF.Lumen that made my eyes have a sad, and a feeling that I was now unable to skip or roll back whatever broken update that Foscam will throw to ruin their software this next time.
For me these are fairly important things.
In the traditional method of rooting an HTC phone (which I had to do prior to being able to even run Sunshine,) the method is enable developer options, enable USB debugging, enable bootloader unlocking, jump through the hoops with HTCDev to get your unlock token, apply it, wipe out the phone, catch the thing before it boots if you can and get it into download mode, push a recovery, launch the recovery, then install SuperSU or such from recovery.
Having been S-OFF from my previous rooted days, this time when I decided I had to ditch stock unrooted I simply enabled developer mode and USB debugging (that last part I was just too lazy to walk over to the phone and press the power button and volume down,) fastboot flashed the recovery, booted to recovery, and then pushed SuperSU 2.65 from a file I downloaded.
This was done with a locked bootloader, no loss of data, and in about two minutes flat.
Sadly I lost Android Pay due to modifying the system partition and how it checks for a valid install, but at least I have my ability to block and uninstall stupid spyware apps back, restore my save games from when I was rooted, and otherwise take control of my phone again.
While you can live without S-OFF, and I really could have survived with about an hour additional work up to this point, if you have the ability now or in a future phone, man it’s great.
