PwnMyMoto Allows System Write on Moto X and Droid 2013 Series

When @jcase released Motoroot for Moto X and the Droid 2013 lineup it had an important feature missing, which was to write to the system partition when bootted into Android. Well @jcase has fixed that and released a new tool called PwnMyMoto.

What is PwnMyMoto

PwnMyMoto is a replacement for  previously released MotoRoot.

How to Install PwnMyMoto and Root

adb install -r PwnMyMoto-<version and model go here>.apk

download apk from here (for Moto X all variants) and from here for Droid Ultra, Maxx and Mini

Once installed run PwnMyMoto, your phone will reboot twice or thrice (yes you can run PwnMyMoto even if you are rooted using MotoRoot) but need not worry. After last reboot PwnMyMoto will uninstall itself and super user should be installed. At this point please install SuperSU from the Play Store.

How do I mount system as write enabled

PwnMyMoto is a bit different, your system partition is not mounted in write mode by default. This is where we quote @jcase:-

We have two (ok more but were not going into that) boot modes. First is normal, which boots regular Android, and in this case boots with system write protected. Second is recovery mode, normally it boots recovery without write protection. Our exploit will hijack recovery bootmode and boot Android without write protection.

After running this exploit, if you boot normally /system will be write protected. If you boot to “recovery”, Android will boot without write protection. If you wish to edit system, you must boot into “recovery” to do so, any changes made will stick and will work in either bootmode. My suggestion is to make your changes in “recovery” and run the device day to day in normal mode, until we are certain “recovery” mode will be 100% stable for day to day use.

How to check write protection

adb shell getprop ro.boot.write_protect

If it returns ’1′ then write protection is applied to /system, if it returns ’0′ then no write protection has been applied.