How to hack and modify your (old) mobilephone
www.hackoooo.blogspot.in
There’s no denying the fact that we’re seeing explosive growth in smartphones both, in terms of features and specifications. As cliched as it may sound, it’s the absolute truth. Heck, we even have a satellite powered by an Android smartphone (Google Nexus One) orbiting around the earth which in fact was launched by our very own ISRO (Read more about it here: http://goo.gl/pSVGl). The crux of the matter is that we have a lot of computing power in our palms but it goes largely untapped due to the restrictions placed by the device manufacturers, carriers and the stock versions of the operating systems.
The methods discussed in the following pages will not only help you
extract maximum performance and unlock advanced features on your latest
smartphone but also help resuscitate older devices making them more
usable. In this section of Tips & Tricks, we’ll cover all the
dominant mobile platforms in the market, detailing how to jailbreak/root
the devices on which they run. The hacks mentioned here will allow you
to sideload, i.e. install third-party apps on your device, install a
custom/modified ROM and give super-user access to the system which will
enable you to tweak the innards of the device.
With great power, comes great responsibility
[DISCLAIMER]
The tools and techniques discussed here provide you with high
privileges allowing you to alter low-level settings and data on a
device. If not handled properly, such changes may result in unexpected
and undesired behaviour which in turn may lead to damaging your device.
Nine Dot Nine Media Interactive Pvt. Ltd is not responsible for any
damage to your phone resulting from your actions based on this guide.
This article is accompanied with the customary disclaimer. What
we’ll discuss here is dangerous and if not done carefully, you may brick
your phone. Jailbreaking/rooting your phone is not illegal as long as
it is limited to non-copyright infringement purposes, but
jailbreaking/rooting your phone will void your device’s manufacturer
warranty so proceed with extreme caution.
Before trying out any method mentioned in these pages, make sure
that you take a full backup of your phone data using the method(s)
mentioned for each OS. Please follow all the instructions provided here
or the guides to which links are provided for a particular model or
device to a tee. Not doing so can lead to extremely dire consequences.
Android
Android is much more relaxed as compared to other platforms when it
comes to allowing the user to install third-party apps which is perhaps
the main reason for rooting/jailbreaking other mobile platforms.
Rooting is the first step in extending the functionality that your phone
has to offer – wireless tethering for older phones, custom ROMs, CPU
overclocking and so on. Rooting in Android is very much akin to running a
program as an administrator in Windows or running a program with the
sudo command in *nix systems.
Back up your phone:
All your contacts, mail, calendar and other Google account specific
data will already be in sync with Google’s servers, so you need not
worry about that. As far as the system data, apps and app data is
concerned there are two ways to go about backing them up – using either
the Titanium Backup app, available in the Google Play Store or ADB
(Android Debug Bridge), a command-line utility included with Google’s
Android SDK. The problem with the first tool is that your phone needs to
be rooted to use Titanium Backup as it requires root permissions, and
brings into existence the classic chicken and egg problem. Titanium
Backup is useful on rooted phones that you plan on installing a custom
ROM on. You’d want to make sure that all your installed applications,
settings and the original firmware are available to you in case you run
into any problems. Another advice here is to go for a Nandroid backup
provided by the Clockwork Recovery Mod or your own custom ROM which
saves an entire image of the device to the disk for future use.
For Android 4.0 and later, you can use the ADB backup. Just
download Holo Backup, a GUI wrapper for conducting the backup, from its
homepage at http://goo.gl/Ya4sL
Once you get the app running , hit “Backup all without system apps” and
you’re set. Since this functionality doesn’t exist for Android 2.3 or
lower, your best bet is to use an application like MyBackup Pro to back
up your other data to the SD card or online and ASTRO File Manager to
copy your application APKs to a safe location.
Root your phone:
The complication for Android is that there are a large variety of
phones available in the market today. Now, while some methods do work
for a very large cross-section of handsets, there’s no universal
one-size-fits-all rooting solution for every phone out there.
We’ll start with the one tool that’s able to root a lot of models,
especially the older ones – it’s called SuperOneClick. The catch is that
it may or may not work for your phone, so you’ll have to dig a little
deeper for another tool, especially for older phones as they have their
own little quirks.
Download SuperOneClick from http://goo.gl/QMOIZ
and extract the downloaded zip file. On your phone make sure that USB
Debugging is enabled under settings and then connect the phone to your
PC. The next step is very important: make sure your SD card is not
mounted before proceeding. Once your phone is detected by SuperOneClick,
click on “Root” to begin the rooting process and wait for it to
complete. That’s it! Once the process completes, your phone will be
rooted and you can then proceed to the post-rooting section of this
guide. In case you face any problem, search the SuperOneClick support
thread on XDA Developers at http://goo.gl/tzReR for others with the same problems as you.
SuperOneClick in action
This app is known not to work with the following phones. You can
use unrevoked.com instead to circumvent the NAND lock used by these
phone.
• Sprint HTC EVO 4G (Supersonic)
• HTC Droid Incredible
• HTC Desire GSM
• HTC Desire CDMA (BravoC)
• HTC Aria
• Droid Eris (HTC DesireC)
• HTC Wildfire (HTC Buzz)
One thing to note here is that there may be other methods as well
by which you can root your phone. You’ll have to find the one that suits
you the best. For example, all phones from HTC released in and after
2011 are allowed by HTC itself to unlock their bootloader (http://goo.gl/YyWIu).
The only step you need to perform after this is flashing a custom ROM
to your device to get the root access. Now other methods may exist which
may do this for your phone in one click, it’s entirely up to your
discretion to select the method that you’re comfortable with.
Some of the latest phones have different exploits and one-click
root tools specifically made for them. They’re listed in the table below
along with links for the respective phone’s guide.
You’ll find that nearly all links point to XDA Forums. It is infact
the mecca of smartphone hacking, rooting and development. Nearly all
the developers congregate and collaborate here, making rooting toolkits
and apps possible. Whenever in doubt just head over to XDA Developers
forums. You’ll find that someone usually has had the exact same problem
as you, and in all probabilities you’ll find an excellent solution here.
| Rootable Phones | Links |
| Samsung Galaxy Note | http://goo.gl/LJfzz |
| HTC One S | http://goo.gl/PLfYj |
| HTC One X | http://goo.gl/OLJlu |
| Sony Xperia S | http://goo.gl/WtunD |
| LG Optimus 4X HD | http://goo.gl/pNHfj |
| Samsung Galaxy Note 2 | http://goo.gl/CGdxX |
| Google/LG Nexus 4 | http://goo.gl/KtTXz |
| Samsung Galaxy SIII | http://goo.gl/XHt82 |
| Samsung Galaxy SII | http://goo.gl/7k8gp |
| HTC Desire | http://goo.gl/4nWr4 |
Things you can do post rooting:
Once you’ve rooted your phone, it will open up a host of hidden
features on your phone. For starters, you’ll be able to flash custom
ROMs such as ParanoidAndroid, LiquidSmooth, Android Open Kang Project,
Cyanogenmod 10 and Xylon to name a few. You’ll find many threads online
which deal with installing/flashing these ROMs on your phone after
rooting. You’ll also be able to install applications which need root
access such as Titanium Explorer, ES File Explorer, ROM Manager, CPU
Master for overclocking and so on. There’s this excellent thread at
Stack Exchange (http://goo.gl/8h0Rm) that will blow you away with the possibilities post rooting of your phone.
Paranoid Android running on Nexus 4
CyanogenMod 10.1 which provides a customized Jelly Bean experience
iOS
Hacking your iOS device, on the other hand, is called jailbreaking.
In an ecosystem which is under tight control by the iron-fists of the
Cupertino-based giant, jailbreaking allows the user to install a
modified operating system by unlocking the bootloader, sideloading
third-party apps apart from those from the App Store and provide root
permissions to the user.
Back up your phone:
Backing up your iPhone is quite straightforward. You could either
have your phone synced with iCloud or just manually create a backup from
iTunes by right-clicking on your phone icon and clicking on “backup”.
An advantage of doing it this way is that you can restore it much
faster. If you’re upgrading from a jailbroken phone, make sure that you
back up your Cydia apps separately so that they can be easily restored
after you’ve upgraded and jailbroken your phone.
You can back up your Cydia apps by downloading OpenBackup from
Cydia’s official repositories. The app is quite easy to operate: simply
open the app and hit the Backup button; this backs up your Cydia data to
either iCloud or iTunes. You also get a local copy if you want to
manually save the backup file to your computer’s hard drive. You’ll find
the backup file at
private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/OpenBackupFiles, and can use
iFunBox to copy the files to your hard drive.
Root your phone:
As opposed to Android, not many methods are available for cracking
your iPhone (infact this works for any iDevice, but we’ll be limiting
our discussion to the iPhones here). The table below details the various
methods available for the different versions of the phone at different
operating system versions.
The highlighted jailbreaks are tethered jailbreaks, i.e. you need
to plug in the phone at every restart so that the jailbreak can be
loaded; this patches the kernel in real time. This might sound quite
cumbersome but it’s the only way to go about doing it for the older
versions of the operating systems. If you update your phone now, you’ll
be updated to iOS 6.1.3 and you won’t be able to downgrade to 6.1.2 or
lower so if you’ve not updated your phone you’re still in luck, as
you’ll still be able to use evasi0n or the respective jailbreaking tool
for your version of operating system. The evad3rs team is hard at work
at bringing out a jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3. Follow them on Twitter
(@evad3rs) for latest updates.
These jailbreak tools are incredibly easy to operate. For e.g.
consider evasi0n. Just grab the latest zip file from the tool’s download
page and extract the file. Make sure that you remove the lock screen
password before proceeding and avoid all iTunes related tasks when
evasi0n is running. In case the process freezes at any time it’s safe to
restart the program and reboot the device to try the process again. To
jailbreak your device just run evasi0n and click on the jailbreak button
for the process to begin. Your phone will restart a couple of times
during the process, be patient. Eventually, the process will run its
course and you’ll be able to tap on the exit button. The phone will
restart and Voila! You’ve just jailbroken your iPhone.
Both the other apps function in a similar way. When in doubt, visit
the forums on the respective app’s pages, and you’re bound to get help
there. Make sure that you find the exact version of your firmware and
use the recommended jailbreaking tool from the table above.
| Jailbreaking Tools | Download Links |
| evasi0n | http://evasi0n.com |
| Greenpois0n/absinth | http://greenpois0n.com |
| Redsnow | http://www.redsn0w.us |
Access features post jailbreaking:
You’ll now have access to an amazing set of features which will let
you modify the phone in some very interesting ways, the first of which
being Cydia. This amazing little app will allow you to download a host
of third-party apps hosted on both, Cydia’s own and other repositories.
You’ll be able to personalize the menu and its appearance along with the
background and lock screen images.
OpenBackup to back up your Cydia apps
Advance task switcher, mods which let you run tasks in the
background, folder enhancer, SSH and GCC are just some of the apps which
form the tip of the iceberg. You can find quite an interesting list of
possibilities compiled by Big Boss over at http://goo.gl/KYhmY.
It lists some of the app mentioned here and many more interesting ones
which can be installed once you’ve jailbroken your phone.
UI Overhaul using WinterBoard
Windows Phone
Rooting a Windows Phone is comparatively trickier. There are three
ways by which you can root/unlock Windows Phone: Developer Unlock,
Interop Unlock and Full Unlock.
1. Developer
Unlock: This allows you to sideload third-party apps on your phone. The
number is restricted to 10 and you need to register yourself at App Hub
at $99/year to unlock your phone. There’s also a student account which
allows you to sideload up to three apps for free.
2. Interop
Unlock: A new lock was introduced with the earlier builds of WP7 Mango
which required apps to have this lock to be able to access device
drivers and other restricted areas such as the registry, root access,
the file system and so on. Called the Interop Unlock by its finder
Heathcliff from the XDA Developer forums, this unlock used exploits to
target the vulnerabilities in some of the manufacturer specific software
to unlock the phone.
Full Unlock: As of now this is only possible for first generation
HTC and Samsung phones. After unlocking the bootloaders and installing
custom ROMs, you need to install Full Unlock packages which patches to
remove the policy checks and gives you full access to the system. The
problem here is that all apps then have full access to your system, even
the bad ones.
Back up your phone :
There are two ways you can go about backing up data on your Windows
Phone. You can either use the WP7 Easy Backup Tool or the WP7 Backup
app. You can grab WP7 Easy Backup Tool at http://goo.gl/qM9bu. The process is quite straightforward and the app is laid out like a wizard to guide you through the backup process.
The app is a very clever piece of software and uses the Zune
updater tool to back up your phone. This backup can be used by Zune to
restore the device when you use the “Update” option under settings. This
will save everything right from the application settings to your texts
inside the update. One downside is that any file changes, updates or
other user specific data won’t persist if they weren’t present at the
time of the backup. Check out the apps’ XDA Developers thread here http://goo.gl/305YK for the download and exact deployment instructions.
WP7 Root Tools to tweak WP performance
Unlock/Root your phone:
Different brands, different OEMs and different versions will have
their own unlocking method(s). We’ve compiled a list of brands and
devices which can be unlocked in the table below. One important thing to
note here is that Windows Phone 8 users won’t be able to unlock their
phones as there are no unlocks available which allow you to root your
phone.
Use WP7 Easy Backup to save all your files on your PC hard-drive
Another possible method is Policy Unlock. Once you manage to get an
Interop Unlock activated on your phone you can sideload WP7 Root Tools
into your phone and then use the bundled exploits to attempt a full
unlock of the phone. You can grab the latest copy of WP7 Root Tools from
http://goo.gl/OYwTj You’ll
also need the Windows Phone SDK to deploy the app file (.xap) to the
phone. You’ll find the deployment program at the location C:Program
Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindows Phonev8.0ToolsXAP Deployment. You can
either use this or XAPDeployX which can be downloaded from its XDA
Developers thread here http://goo.gl/bvhCb.
Note that this will only work once you’ve interop-unlocked the phone or
on the 1st generation Windows phones with Developer Unlock.
| Unlockable Phones | Links |
| Samsung 1st Generation Phones | http://goo.gl/mvk35 |
| Samsung 2nd Generation Phones (OS Version 7740 and below) |
http://goo.gl/iYIsL |
| LG | http://goo.gl/eauag |
| HTC 1st Generation | http://goo.gl/YREop |
| HTC 2nd Generation | http://goo.gl/jJGMO |
| Nokia 710 and 800 | http://goo.gl/o8Snj |
Things you can do post unlock/rooting:
A host of brilliant applications are made available once you’ve
unlocked your phone, starting with Jaxbot’s WPH Tweaks, which enables
you to carry out a smorgasbord of much needed tweaks to the OS. Other
applications include the installation of new themes, dynamic
backgrounds, lock screen widgets, orientation lock, file explorer,
screen capture, certificate installer and much more.
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