So far, there has been no successful root for Samsung's Galaxy S7 line powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, which is the version that the company released in North America.
While rooting an Android device comes with different kinds of risks, it allows users to take advantage of the open source nature of the operating system.
There is still no fully working root for the Samsung Galaxy S7 line, but a senior member of the online XDA forums is at the very least making progress.
The forum member, who goes by the name Sunderwear, has started a thread on XDA that showed a proof of concept on a successful rooting of the Galaxy S7 edge. The rooting was shown to be an authentic one through the usage of a root checker app that can detect if a device has root access properly installed.
Sunderwear also uploaded a video of him using the rooted Galaxy S7 edge, showing root access being properly installed on the smartphone with different kinds of apps being installed into the device.
The forum post does not indicate instructions on how such a root was achieved for the smartphone, but it reveals that Sunderwear has made great progress on how to develop a root exploit for the Galaxy S7 edge. There is no indication if the rooting was a temporary one that was done by taking advantage of a certain exploit, or if the smartphone's bootloader has been unlocked successfully.
The root, however, still needs some work. While most of the apps shown in the video request root access work, there are still some bugs that are appearing. As such, the root is not yet finished, though from the looks of it, it is very close to being done.
Sunderwear said on his XDA forum post that there is no estimated date for the completion of the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge root yet. If ever it gets released though, the general public should be warned that rooting an Android device comes with certain risks, and that the procedure should only be done by users who know exactly what they are doing.
The previous iterations of Samsung's flagship smartphone line, the Galaxy S6, required the use of a tool known as the PingPong root to gain root access to the smartphone. The tool allowed users to bypass KNOX security, which, when tripped would permanently disqualify the device from being used for secure features.
