Magisk creator speaks out for the first time after joining Google: Maintenance will continue, but major changes will occur

magisk-development-continues

Back in May, John Wu, the creator of the well-known Android root tool Magisk, announced that he had joined Google as a member of the Android security team (click to view our previous coverage). Since then, Magisk users and industry practitioners have expressed doubts about whether Google will allow developers to continue working on the project in its current form, and have expressed concerns about the future of the Magisk project, given the obvious conflict of interest between Magisk and Android. Recently, John Wu finally gave a clear answer to the future of the Magisk project.

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In an article published by Wu Honglin, he said that although he currently works for Google and Magisk does have a certain conflict of interest with Android, the project will not die and development will not be terminated. Users can continue to use Magisk, and Wu Honglin himself will continue to participate in the work of the Magisk community, but will be subject to "extra scrutiny" from Google.

Although the Magisk project has not been updated for a long time since May, Wu Honglin clarified everyone's previous suspicions this time. In fact, he just spent a lot of time to obtain the approval he needed to continue working on the project. It is not uncommon for technology companies like Google to review the external work done by their employees, especially when these external works directly affect the departments where the employees work.

The biggest change in the Magisk project in the future will be MagiskHide. This module of Magisk allows rooted users to hide root information from Android apps. This feature is mainly for apps that stop working or cannot use some functions after detecting root. Wu Honglin said that since he now has access to "almost all Google source code" and MagiskHide is designed to circumvent Google SafetyNet Attestation security measures, Wu Honglin can only stop the development of MagiskHide, and only some basic functions will be retained in the future.

In the future users will be able to specify a denylist of processes where Magisk will deny further modifications and revert all modifications it has made. Magisk will not spoof/alter/manipulate any signals or traces not related to Magisk to circumvent detection of any device state.

Basically, MagiskHide will no longer hide root permissions from apps, but will be used to ensure that user-selected apps cannot be modified.

Another change is that Magisk will lose the official Magisk Module Repository. Magisk-Module-Repo will be removed from the Magisk app and moved to Github, where "trusted community members" will be responsible for management.

Although Magisk was originally just a personal project developed by Wu Honglin out of interest, the open source community has now played an increasingly important role in Magisk. As Wu Honglin said, in the past year, "significant external contributions to Magisk core components have increased." These contributions have fixed many bugs in the project and expanded device support. In the future, the project will still rely on the contributions of the open source community.

This article is reproduced from OSCHINA

Title of this article: Magisk creator speaks out after joining Google: Will continue to maintain, but major changes will occur

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