Android Pay no longer works with latest root methods

One of the major drawbacks of rooting your phone these days is losing access to certain apps. Ones that work with secure data, such as your bank details, often won’t run on rooted devices, although that hasn’t stopped the development community from finding ways around this. However, it seems that Google is now wise to the latest trick and will be updating its server side system to prevent rooters from using app like Android Pay.

Highly regarded developer Chainfire came up with a root method that avoids tampering with the /System memory partition, meaning that the method didn’t trigger SafetyNet detection used by apps including Android Pay. This weekend through, Google appears to have begun rolling out a server side update to counteract this exploit, which is disabling use of SafetyNet protected apps even when using this root method. As this update is being applied to the off-device servers, there’s nothing that root users can do about it. The jig is up, at least for now.

With increasingly tight security, app restrictions and regular Android security exploits that need patching, rooting seems like more of a hassle these days. Fortunately, users who want to regain full access to apps like Android Pay can simply unroot their device or even go back to a stock ROM image.