[Android Apps and Games] 3c:
Recent Update - Mea Culpa

You have certainly noticed the recent updates that is supposed to improve root handling in my apps, and might have experienced issues.

Why make such change

In versions before 1.6.12, the app was using a very common root method, using scripts and Android commands. Each action was taking 120ms just to get started. Some features like app manager and explorer run a lot of them. With Marshmallow, there's even a bug that cause determining path to fail and require root, slowing down everything a lot.

I started testing a shared library in 1.6.12 that would run root commands directly without this 120ms overhead and it worked really well, running some commands in 1ms instead!

In 1.7, I've started 'migrating' all root features to this new method, always implementing a fall-back in case something went wrong. That didn't work so well in the end.

What went wrong?

To make it short, I was testing this new method on a few devices, running Android 6.0.1, 5.1, 4.4 and supposedly 2.3 but it was running 4.1.2. You can imagine easily how misleading this was!

I learned that Samsung devices had special security constraints that made some commands fail completely and prevented the fallback to take place.

At the same time, Xposed module was reported to fail on Marshmallow because of new security policies. Had to change everything because of that!

Then the APK build process was no longer building the x64 versions anymore.

What's next

I'm still receiving reports of various issues on different versions of Android that I will have to address in the next few days/weeks.

Android N is coming with new security restrictions that will require further changes, but this new root method is already taking care of that.

Did I make a bad decision?

No. Since Android implemented SELinux security policies in 4.2/4.3, each new version of Android has required many internal changes to keep features working, and its getting worse with M and now N.

This new method not only offers much better performance but also requires much less workaround to keep working.

Yes, I made a mistake. After hours of working nights and week-ends, it was still not ready for public release as I thought.

What went even more wrong?

In my desire to offer the best experience possible, I published fixes too quickly and instead of stabilizing stuff, I've only made it worse.

Long story short

I'm sorry for any inconveniences you might have experienced, and I'll do my best to make it better asap.

Want to help?

If you experience any issues and want to help, please send a support request from app settings, help and support, mentioning what happens and possibly screenshot for my understanding.

The support request provides valuable information on the Android version, app logs, Xposed version if installed, app config, etc... Much needed so that I can investigate the issue with similar environment, otherwise I might be testing on a dozen devices without reproducing the issue.

I can then send you an updated APK with a fix or with active debug if I can't pin-point the problem on my test devices.

FWIW: Version 1.7 was addressing a number of issues in previous versions and I did hope it would make users happy with some nice improvements. My bad.