grack.com

UPDATE: We (ozzeh, joshua, shadowmite and I) just put the teaser site together for the EVO root. More info coming soon: http://unrevoked.com

I ended up with a Sprint HTC EVO 4G after Google I/O. It’s a pretty fantastic phone, even though it’s something of a kitchen sink. By a happy coincidence, I ended up reconnecting with some of my buddies from the old mobile hacking days who were looking to root it. With a few hours effort and a three person team (credit to ozzeh and Joshua Wise!), we managed to get the standard su tool installed.

This sort of disassembly and hacking really brought back memories. Shadowmite introduced me to mobile phone hacking back in the day. Back then we were doing stuff like porting Linux to the device and hacking the bootloader.

In any case, here’s some screenshots. We’re not releasing any details on the root hack yet:

At this time, we believe that this specific exploit cannot be applied to Incredible.

You can find me on twitter as @mmastrac

No surprise here: lots of people are interested in the details of the root process. There’s four reasons why we aren’t releasing anything yet:

1. We’re still working on making the root ‘sticky’. The current root doesn’t persist beyond a reboot, meaning you need to root it every time you reboot the device.
2. We want to package up the rooter in an easy-to-install, one-click application so we’re not holding people’s hands through adb shell.
3. We don’t want to give HTC any details that they could use to fix the hole before the official release.
4. We want to make sure that when Froyo is released on this device, we can still get root on it.

#1 is the only real technical challenge left, but we’ve almost cracked it. Stay tuned for details.

FWIW, I can’t use my HTC Evo up here in Canada, so I’ll be selling or trading it after we finish everything up. It’s a great phone, but the best parts of it come from being a great network device.