We've featured plenty of tools in the past that allow an end-user to modify his or her own build.prop. We've also featured a set of tools for app developers to incorporate that allow applications to modify the file. These (obviously) all require root access, as you're modifying system settings. However, to date we haven't featured a method of reading the build.prop from an app.

There are plenty of reasons why an app developer would want read-only access a device's build.prop. Be it to know about its software or hardware configuration, or simply to peek into some system settings, looking into this treasure trove of information is potentially quite useful for an app developer. However, requiring root access to do so is unnecessary from both user hassle and security standpoints.

In a quest to access the build.prop from his own app without resorting to root, XDA Forum Member torpedo mohammadi wrote a couple of lines of code and shared it with the community. The way he goes about it can be summarized in his explanation:

1. Make a process which executes "getprop" from the "/system/bin/getprop" directory and initialize the String which we want to get (ro.board.platform in example).

2. Make a BufferedReader which gets the value (String) by retrieving the data from a inputStreamReader().

3.Convert the BufferedReader to String.

Head over to the original thread to get started, copy the code, and get it implemented into your app.