Magisk adds Android 12 support, drops MagiskHide

Magisk is an open source set of tools that allow users to root and customize Android devices by installing modules and modifying boot images, among other things. Now developer John Wu has announced the release of the first Magisk Canary (pre-beta) build with support for Android 12.

But the new software also drops support for MagiskHide, a popular feature that up until recently had allowed users to hide the fact that their phones were rooted from certain apps.

For example, many banking apps and some multimedia apps won’t work properly on rooted devices. MagiskHide allowed your device to trick those apps into thinking it wasn’t rooted, allowing you to continue using them.

There are a few reasons Wu says he dropped support for MagiskHide in the latest build. One is that Google has made it trickier to hide the root status with the rollout of hardware key attestation feature that’s becoming more widely used.

The other reason is that Wu now works for Google’s Android Platform Security team, and while he has the go-ahead to continue to working on a utility that lets power users root and customize their Android devices, it would be a conflict of interest for him to continue developing software that’s explicitly designed to circumvent Android security features.

That said, third-party developers are still free to develop Magisk modules (or other software) that attempts to hide root access. There are already some available, although Wu thinks they’ll stop working eventually (although it’s always possible somebody will find other methods that Wu hasn’t thought of in the future).

In addition to dropping MagiskHide and adding support for Android 12, the latest Canardy Build introduces the new Zygisk feature, which should lead to improved performance, as well as a few other features and improved support for some devices. You can find more details in the changelog.

via @topjohnwu and xda-developers (1)(2)