 Okay. And welcome. Today we're looking at, I had a viewer ask about when you root an Android device, can you still get OTAs over the air updates? And the answer is depending on how you root it. So a lot of the updates, check to make sure that your partitions, your system has not been modified in any way. This is one to prevent you from rooting it because they don't want you to in some cases. And in other cases, just to make sure that you're not pushing an update that is wrong is going to break the phone. That being said, for me, I root my phone using, I believe it's pronounced mask, M-A-G-I-S-K. It's a free open source up on a GitHub project. Very easy. If you can unlock the bootloader, you can pretty much root your phone, but it does not modify your system or any read-only partitions. What it does is it makes a backup of your boot partition, but then modifies your boot partition so that when it's mounted, it gives you root access. So you can do things like over the air updates, but you can't just do the updates. So on my phone, I just got this little notification to have an update. Before I go to update now, I'm going to follow this instruction. So anytime I do this, which is once every three months or so, I think I get an update on my particular phone, I just search mask OTA and usually the first link that comes up is these instructions here. So on the left are the instructions. On the right is my phone. What I'm going to do here is I am going to go and I am going to come in here and I'm going to go to the mask app, which I actually have hidden. Once this goes away, I have some apps hidden just because I don't use them regularly. I'm going to click on mask here and following these instructions. So basically what this is going to do is it's going to restore the original boot partition. Do the update. Before you reboot, you reinstall mask. That way you don't lose the root. If you reboot without reinstalling it, then you have to go through the regular process of going through twerp to install mask. So we're going to go in here and so first go to mask app, install restore images. So I install mask, restore images and it's going to restore. Okay, restoration done. Now I should be able to come in here, go back to my update and click update now. I've got it and it's going to start going. It's downloading now. So however long it takes for this update to download, it's verifying it. Once that's done downloading and it goes through its install process, it's going to ask me to reboot. Before I reboot, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to go back and I'm going to go into my mask application. I'm going to install to an inactive slot. It may vary whether you have an A or B partition. I'm not going to go into so much what that means. Obviously if you have an A and B partition, you have two copies of your system installed to an A partition and a B partition. Most new phones, my screen just turned off. Most new phones will have an A and B partition. This helps prevent your device from getting brick. If one partition gets messed up and the phone can't boot, it will switch over to the previous partition so that way if an update screws things up, you just default back to the last install. It might be a little different if you don't have an A, B but you just follow the instructions on this screen. It looks like here it says it's doing a background installation. Let's go ahead and click on that and see what it is. It's 68, 70% complete. I'm going to pause for a second just so we don't have to sit here and watch this download. While we're waiting, I will say, because someone will ask, I am running a Moto G stylus that I got last Black Friday for pretty much nothing. That's a nice little phone. We've uninstalled Mask, but we still have root because we haven't rebooted yet. Everything is still in RAM. If I was to reboot now, I would have no root access. The only way to reinstall it is to go into the bootloader because to modify that boot partition, you need root, which you can in a custom recovery like twerp. That's why before we reboot, I need to, while I still have this root running in RAM, reinstall Mask, but again, besides just doing your update, the only thing you have to do is go and uninstall, restore the original boot image. Then again, when this is done, I'm going to come in and I'm going to follow these instructions, go into the Mask app, install, install to inactive slot, and then I'll restart. I'll pause during this install process, this update process. Also while we're waiting, Mask, again, it's up on GitHub. You can see the full source code for it and the license. There's a GPL version three and also you can see up here that it has almost 19,000 stars. I have been very leery in the past about some of these root kits. In the past, with a lot of phones, I figured out how to root things myself. Basically, if you can unlock the bootloader, you can modify the partitions to your liking, although in some cases, if you modify certain things, you're not going to be able to do over-the-air updates. In the past, I would use that to get my self-root access and every time there's a new version of Android, I had to figure out a new way to do it. I looked into Mask a lot before I installed it. Again, fully open source. All the source code is here. I've read how it worked. It's very simple how it works, although it does a lot of very complicated things to make sure that things get backed up and can be restored. Again, just because something's open source doesn't mean that there isn't malicious code in there, but the fact it's open source, there's so many contributors and there's so many stars. This source code, in my opinion, has been looked over quite a bit. It's been around for a while. It's very easy to use as long as you can unlock your bootloader. That's a very simple thing to do on certain devices. Whenever I buy a new phone, I always make sure I can unlock the bootloader. Motorola is very good about that. I've owned a few Motorola phones, basically. I've gone over this in the past. You just go to their website and say, I want to unlock my phone. You run a few fast boot commands. It gives you a key for your phone. You put that in their website. It gives you a key to put on the phone and unlocks it. You technically void the warranty, but has anyone actually used a warranty that was useful? I haven't. So yeah, check out the MASC project if you haven't. And yeah, still waiting for this update to completely download and install. So I'll pause the recording one more time. Well, that's quite a bit longer than I had hoped. Well, let's get moving forward on this. Let's go ahead and I am going to go back over to, without restarting, we're going to go back into the MASC app. That go away. And now we're going to click Install MASC. And following the directions here, install to Inactive Slot. Install to Inactive Slot after OTA. And we will say, OK. And let's go. Should only take a moment. Let's go back up your boot partition and then install its changes, flashing the new image. It's a little blurry. I don't know if you can read that in the video here. And we're all done. And now we can click Reboot. And that is it. We'll give my phone a second here to reboot. You won't be able to watch it while it's rebooting. But hopefully my phone will restart and I'll be at the newest version of Android. And my phone has rebooted. Be aware after any update, the boot process takes a little bit longer. So if it takes two minutes for your phone to boot, that's normal after an update. And then you'll get this that you've successfully updated. And to make sure that we still have root, I'll go into Turmux. And I will type in SU. I still have root access. So there you go. If you've rooted with MASC, again, I'm assuming that's how you say it, you can do over-the-air updates as long as you follow the instructions. So thanks for watching. As always, please visit filmsbycrisk.com. That's Chris with a K. There should be a link in the description. And I hope that you have a great day.