OFC Root Status: Not available
After Sprint, the T-Mobile Galaxy Note 4 received Android 5.1.1 update today, however, it came in a pretty strange way. First, this isn’t a OTA, which is actually good for us folks who are looking to get it rooted, but the real concern is the model number it’s intended towards “N910T3”.
Apparently, N910T3 is one of the hardware revisions of the original N910T variant. The firmware is for the T-Mobile Note 4, there’s no doubt about that but we aren’t yet sure of this works fine on the N910T variant.
Anyway, we know Sprint released the Note 4 5.1.1 firmware yesterday and the T-Mobile Note 4 5.1.1 build should be similar to it for the most part, meaning it’ll break Cf-Auto-Root and all other known root methods for the device known so far. Plus, it’ll also upgrade the bootloader on the device without any fallback option to get back to the earlier 5.0.2 bootloader.
The only way to get root access on Note 4 5.1.1 update is via custom kernel with root baked-in and SELinux set to permissive. I guess that’s reason Cf-Auto-Root doesn’t work anymore as it tries to keep SELinux set to enforcing mode to keep its security benefits.
A custom kernel with root isn’t available for this OFC firmware for the T-Mobile Note 4 yet, but if this firmware works fine for the N910T variant then expect root access to be available in the next few days.
[…] However, it wasn’t for the N910T Note 4 variant that is owned by most users. Instead, the 5.1.1 update was meant for the N910T3 variant of T-Mobile Note 4, which apparently is a revision of the original N910T variant with slightly […]