How I get root-ish access without rooting my Android phones

Published Sep 8, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT Faisal believes in technology that puts control and freedom in your hands. He fell down the Android rabbit hole in his childhood because it promised just that. He has bylines at Android Headlines, SlashGear, WhatMobile, How-toGeek and XDA, spanning the last 7 years. The goal of his work is to help others liberate their digital lives and to make technology feel fun again. He writes extensively about open-source software (OSS), easy productivity, home-labbing, power user tinkering. Faisal has a Bachelor's in English literature. He also enjoys watercolors, retro video games, animation, and cats. Rooting is the Android equivalent of jailbreaking an iPhone. Basically, it grants you total access to the hardware and the operating system running on it (which manufacturers lock down by default). With that advanced access, you can do a wide range of useful and practical things that are impossible on a standard Android phone or tablet. You can make system-level changes to the operating system (say, the user interface elements or system apps) or tweak the hardware it's running on (overclocking or underclocking the CPU, for example). You don't usually see rooted phones in the wild because this access comes at the cost of certain apps and features. Rooting breaks financial and banking apps, for instance. It also voids your device warranty. However, rooted and unrooted aren't your only options. There's a middle-of-the-road option that lets you gain some advanced privileges without rooting the phone or disrupting its normal functionality. All you need to do is install an app called Shizuku and toggle a few settings. Let me show you how it works. The apps I've covered here are freely available and open source. Getting Shizuku How to set everything up Android developers regularly need to communicate with the phone via their computer. The Android Debug Bridge, or ADB, provides that link, allowing them to send and execute Android commands from the computer. They can do this wirelessly or over USB. With ADB, developers also get elevated system privileges that are normally restricted. This elevated access is what Shizuku makes use of. This app pretends to be a computer and lets the phone connect to it. When another app needs those high-level privileges, Shizuku acts as the "go-between" and lets the app make system calls that would otherwise be restricted. You can install Shizuku from the Google Play Store. Make sure you are connected to Wi-Fi before proceeding. To start, enable Developer Options. Go to Settings, scroll to About, and tap Build Number seven times. The systems menu will gain a new Develop Options panel. Open it and look for the Wireless Debugging toggle. Enable it too. Then go back and launch the Shizuku app. Tap the Pair button on the main screen. It will take you to Developer Options. Press the shortcut and find the Wireless Debugging menu again. This time, however, instead of tapping the toggle, tap the Wireless Debugging text. Here you should see Pair device with pairing code, which gives you a six-digit code. Swipe down to get to the notification shade and look for the sticky Shizuku text field. Enter those six digits in that field. If the connection is successful, it takes you to the main Shizuku screen, where you can tap Start to start the Shizuku background service. Some cool things you can do with Shizuku With that rigmarole out of the way, we can now get some Shizuku-powered apps to do some useful things. Get rid of bloatware Canta is a must-have, and usually the first app I install after setting up Shizuku. It lets you remove preinstalled apps that are usually locked behind a greyed-out Uninstall button. Install Canta from the Play Store and select the apps you want to remove (it flags apps that are safe to remove). Proceed with caution, and don't remove system components you aren't sure about. Removing the wrong app could break the OS or some of its features. Then press the trash button in the corner. On the first run, it will ask for permission from Shizuku. Grant that. After that, you should be able to remove any app from the neatly organized list that Canta provides. It also backs up your removed apps in a bin, in case you want to restore one later. Cut apps off from the internet Normally, firewall apps on Android use what's called a "VPN tunnel" to filter your internet traffic and restrict certain apps from using mobile data or Wi-Fi. The downside is that these VPN-based firewalls need to run constantly in the background. Plus, you can't use your actual VPN apps while such a firewall is running. With Shizuku, you can block apps from the internet without a persistent background VPN service. It saves battery and frees up your device from VPN apps. ShizuWall is a firewall app built for just that. You can get ShizuWall for free from the F-Droid store. It's also available on the Play Store, but that version is paid. ShizuWall will ask you to choose an operating mode on the first launch. Choose Shizuku and grant the requested permissions. Now you can scroll through the list of apps and enable the firewall toggle to cut their internet access. Freeze battery-draining apps The Android interface doesn't allow you to suspend apps permanently on demand. So apps can wake up periodically and drain the battery in the background. But if you "freeze" an app, it can no longer start up on its own. Freezing apps required root access, but you can get around that restriction with Shizuku. The app is called Hail. You can grab it from the F-Droid store. It's not available on the Play Store. After launching Hail, go to Settings and select Working Mode. Choose Shizuku Suspend as the default operating mode. Next, select the apps you want to freeze under the Apps tab. Jump to the Home tab and tap the snowflake icon to freeze your selected apps. Shizuku gives your phone superpowers The three apps I mentioned only scratch the surface of what Shizuku can do. The open source community has developed a wonderful ecosystem around this one powerful app. It allows for a ton of practical stuff, like call recording, system tweaks, per-app volume control, deep cleaning the storage, automatic updates for sideloaded apps, customization (like per-app dark mode), and more.