Determine If Running on a Rooted Device

Determining if an Android device is rooted programmatically?

Rooting detection is a cat and mouse game and it is hard to make rooting detection that will work on all devices for all cases.

See Android Root Beer https://github.com/scottyab/rootbeer for advanced root detection which also uses JNI and native CPP code compiled into .so native library.

If you need some simple and basic rooting detection check the code below:

  /**
   * Checks if the device is rooted.
   *
   * @return <code>true</code> if the device is rooted, <code>false</code> otherwise.
   */
  public static boolean isRooted() {

    // get from build info
    String buildTags = android.os.Build.TAGS;
    if (buildTags != null && buildTags.contains("test-keys")) {
      return true;
    }

    // check if /system/app/Superuser.apk is present
    try {
      File file = new File("/system/app/Superuser.apk");
      if (file.exists()) {
        return true;
      }
    } catch (Exception e1) {
      // ignore
    }

    // try executing commands
    return canExecuteCommand("/system/xbin/which su")
        || canExecuteCommand("/system/bin/which su") || canExecuteCommand("which su");
  }

  // executes a command on the system
  private static boolean canExecuteCommand(String command) {
    boolean executedSuccesfully;
    try {
      Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command);
      executedSuccesfully = true;
    } catch (Exception e) {
      executedSuccesfully = false;
    }

    return executedSuccesfully;
  }

Probably not always correct. Tested on ~10 devices in 2014.

How can you detect if the device is rooted in the app?

At the end of the day, you can't. A rooted device may be modified in any way, and thus can completely hide whatever it wants from you. In practice you could look at some of the standard root builds to find features they have or characteristics you can look at... but there is no way to guarantee that whatever you do will actually detect a "rooted" device.

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