XDA Senior Recognized Developer Chainfire needs no introduction in the world of third party development, so we'll spare you some time.

Today, Chainfire brings to us his latest work -- suhide. Suhide is an experimental mod for SuperSU, one that leverages the systemless installation to give you a way to hide the su binary from applications on a per-application level. Best part, it does not currently make use of the Xposed framework, so it should appeal to those users who just want root but do not wish to dabble into the Xposed side of things.

Why would you use suhide?

Suhide comes into the picture if you have apps that detect for the presence of root. One of the most popular use cases is Android Pay, but there are several other apps (mainly apps that have to do with banking and corporate security) that will not work if you have root. These apps do have legitimate reasons not to work, but as a power user, you have your own reasons on why you want root. So if you understand the risks associated and want the coexistence of the two worlds, suhide is one of the routes you can go through to achieve just that. Suhide hides root on a per-app basis, so you do not need to globally disable root at all.


Suhide in its current state has a few limitations. One of the major ones is that there is no GUI, so this puts the mod away from the reach of beginners (and rightfully so, in our opinion). Next, while this is Chainfire's own work, he classifies it as experimental and does not intend to officially support it as a part of SuperSU. Further, the mod has been tested on just a handful of devices, so not all anomalous behaviors have been documented just yet. The mod also is limited to ARM/ARM64 based devices. It also does not hide the SuperSU GUI, so apps that detect the GUI will still detect root. And lastly, Chainfire considers the coexistence of root and security-centric implementations as a losing game. The man does a good job at explaining his stance, so we recommend you go ahead and give it a read to understand the same.

For installation and usage instructions and for download links, head on over to the forum thread. Remember to reflash SuperSU after installation and after removal as well.

Having options that help in the coexistence of apps that require security and apps that require root is certainly a good thing. But ultimately, you should be mentally prepared to one day not be able to do so.

Have you tried out suhide? What are your thoughts and experiences? Let us know in the comments below!