Paul Morris·

Galaxy Note 8 Root Available Using SamFAIL Without Tripping Knox, Here Are The Details

Some consumers who adore the Android ecosystem will be perfectly happy owning an unmodified, out-of-the-box Samsung Galaxy Note 8. However, there is a thriving and growing community who will be absolutely delighted to know that the Snapdragon variant of Samsung’s Note 8  available in the United States has now been rooted thanks to a new tool named SamFAIL.

Anyone with this level of experience of tinkering and modifying devices running Android will be fully aware that being able to achieve root pretty much opens the door to any type of modification that you would like, at any level.

With that said, hacking and trying to get root access on Samsung’s device is always a risky business due to the fact that it’s generally likely to trip the device’s built-in Knox security protocols which have some fairly nasty repercussions. Once Knox kicks in, the warranty on the device is voided permanently and Samsung Pay is entirely disabled forever. The ideal situation is to be able to come up with a solution which successfully achieves root without alerting the Knox suite that it has actually happened. That solution is SamFAIL.

The process does come with a few caveats and discussion points, but none quite as large or as serious as alerting Knox to what is actually going on in the device. SamFAIL doesn’t bring the capabilities of being able to SIM unlock the device. Nor will it unlock the bootloader. Additionally, this will also disable SafetyNet, so apps like Snapchat may cause you trouble, and not run at all.

It is simply in existence to achieve root status, which, rather bizarrely, also causes a situation where the phone itself won’t ever charge beyond 80% capacity.

SamFAIL will also work on the European Exynos version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, but doing so will trip Knox, which means that the warranty will be voided and Samsung Pay will be disabled. Given the limitations of this solution it really doesn’t seem worth introducing those trade-offs for what you actually get. For more information on SamFAIL, including testing information and the process involved in actually using it, you can visit the originating XDA Developers forum thread here with the developer talking in detail about the creation and how you can go about using it on your device.

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