There are plenty of apps in Google Play these days, but a relatively small proportion are designed to unlock the power of a rooted device. Since it can be easy for these powerful apps to get obscured by the crush of retro, free-to-play, side-scrolling platformer games, we like to aggregate the best root-only apps on occasion. Whether you want to free up some screen real estate, change icons around, or manage your backups, the apps you need are right here.
Full!screen
All modern Android tablets use an on-screen system bar to display navigation buttons, but what if you want to reclaim that space? If you have root access, Full!screen might be just the thing. This app can clear the navigation and notification area from your tablet without making any functions inaccessible. In place of your system UI elements, you get a pair of buttons in the bottom corners of the screen. With these buttons you can trigger home, back, menu, and multitasking. Even notifications are accessible.
There are a ton of settings in Full!screen that can be used to customize the experience. The position, opacity, and function of each button can be altered, as well. Long-press functionality for the buttons can be customized to your liking. It even has pie-menus, if that's your thing.
Children Tracker
For helicopter parents with a tech savvy side, Children Tracker is the perfect tool for obsessively monitoring one's offspring. Just install this root app on your kid's phone, and you'll be able to invade their privacy like never before! Children Tracker monitors location, app usage, texts, web surfing habits, and so on. All that data is uploaded to the service's website for your later analysis. Children Tracker can even alert you when the device leaves a pre-defined area.
Features include:
- Location: automatically track the location and movement of your children 24/7
- Call logs & SMS: record all call logs and text messages that your children sent along with recipient information.
- Web surfing: all visited web pages are transferred to cloud and report to you.
- Other activities: track which apps they installs and uses, device on/off, connected hotspots,etc.
- Data visualization: different data view helps you the best user experience while explore tracked data, including dashboard, timeline and location styles
- Secure & realtime: your data is securely stored on our secure cloud (Google App Engine). View their activity in real time and see fully recorded activities in the past
- Smart remote tracking: app smartly tracks selected data and dynamically change configuration to adapt environment and device configuration.
- App visibility: app's icon can be hidden, dial ***123456### to open it by default
This app certainly claims it's for parents to keep tabs on their kids, but I would not be surprised to hear some jealous spouses are using it to spy on their significant others. Let's be ethical here, folks.
BBQScreen
Capturing the video output from an Android device is notoriously difficult, but BBQScreen from well-known XDA devs XpLoDWilD and nebkat claims to make it a breeze. With this app, your rooted phone or tablet can stream full-speed 25FPS video to a Windows, Mac, or Linux PC.
BBQScreen isn't for interacting with the device – it's just a mirroring app. Simply install the app on the phone or tablet, and the client on your computer. You then have to enter your local IP address, and BBQScreen should be working immediately. The app seems to be quite hit or miss for users, so make sure you test it thoroughly in that 15 minute return window.
BBQScreen *ROOT*
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FPS Meter
PC gamers have had FPS overlays to make it easier to tweak settings for as long as 3D games have existed. On Android, it's a bit more complicated. You'll need root access to replicate this functionality, but FPS Meter is here to take care of business. With this app you can enable a clean floating overlay with your current, average, maximum, and minimum frames per-second.
You can change the text size, location, and opacity from FPS Meter's settings. Some users report issues with freezing during use, but that can often be solved by turning off hardware overlays in the developer options.
FPS Meter
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eXperience Pro
For the most serious root users, flashing ROMs and kernels is an essential part of the Android experience. For these brave souls there is eXperience Pro. This app contains an assortment of popular kernel tweaks that can be applied on-the-fly to any kernel you want. No more will you have to pick and choose from custom kernels – just enable the tweaks you want with eXperience Pro.
Currently implemented tweaks include:
- Touchwake (all devices): When the screen times out (NOT manual lock with power button) one can simply touch the screen to activate it which is much more convenient than pressing the power button - especially great for tablets.
- Music Control (all devices): Control the music playback with the volume buttons. Long press of the volume up button skips to the next song, long press of the volume down button skips back to the previous song (or rewinds the currently playing song). Simultaneous long press of both volume buttons pauses the song or continues playback when paused.
- CPUfreq Control (all devices): Adjust the minimum and maximum CPU frequency step.
- CPU Control (select devices): Add and remove CPU frequency steps and adjust the voltages for the different CPU frequency steps.
- Volume Control (select devices): Adjust the output volume of the headphones and device internal speaker and the input volume of the camcorder and handset microphones.
The developer claims support for a few dozen devices, but there are a smattering of complaints in the reviews about supported phones not functioning correctly. It's best to proceed with caution, especially when playing around with root apps.
Icon Themer
Root apps don't always have to be about mercilessly bending the system to your twisted will. No, sometimes you just want to make things pretty. Icon Themer lets you take your favorite icon pack and apply it to any custom launcher. This app works with over 100 custom icon themes in Google Play, so you can surely find the one that strikes your fancy without worrying if it is designed for your particular launcher.
Setting up Icon Themer is a little involved – you have to install the Xposed Framework and reboot a few times before finally seeing your shiny new icons. One of the cool additional features of Icon Themer is that the icons you choose will actually be applied throughout the system, not just in the launcher. This is how the app bypasses launcher-specific restrictions. It's not free, but $1.49 isn't a bad price.
Icon Themer ★ root
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SoftKeyZ
The trend toward on-screen navigation buttons on Android has been divisive. Most OEMs still refuse to implement them, but Google's Nexus line, Sony, and Motorola are all on-board. With some root magic, you can tweak those devices to swap out the boring old buttons with SoftKeyZ. Some custom ROMs have had some limited ability to change the navigation buttons for some time now, but this app makes the process incredibly easy for most ROMs.
All you need to start using SoftKeyZ is root access and Busybox, which most root methods include. There are over 150 different buttons in the app, all of which are pre-mapped to their respective functions. You can also backup the default settings to return to stock at any time. If you love customization, this is a very handy app.
SoftKeyZ ★ root
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Nandroid Manager
In many ways, this is a fitting app to close out the roundup. If you're going to go mucking around with system files and flashing ROMs, it's a good idea to have a nandroid backup of your phone. A backup can save your bacon in the event of a serious calamity, but what if you don't want to restore an entire backup? Nandroid Manager lets you excise a specific part of your backup and restore just that element.
Current features include:
- View basic info about your nandroid backups.
- Explore contents of nandroid backup.
- Extract files from nandroid backups.
- Support for yaffs2.
- Rename backup.
- Compress backup to zip.
- Delete backup.Verify and regenerate MD5 hashes for backups.
- Restore Apps+Data from backup.
- Restore Text Messages from backup.
- Restore Call Logs from backup.
- Restore WiFi Access Points from backup (Pro).
- Restore Bluetooth Data from backup (Pro).
- Restore User Word Dictionary from backup (Pro).
- Restore Browser Data from backup (Pro).
- Restore Nandroid Backup.
- Flash new recovery.
- Fix permissions tool.
The developer plans to expand the options for restore in upcoming releases. Exporting data so it can be restored on other devices is also on the agenda for the future. If you flash a lot of ROMs, buying the pro version for a buck is probably a solid idea.
Nandroid Manager Pro
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Nandroid Manager * ROOT
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