X-plore allows you to access files on device in root mode.
You may learn about rooting Android device here.
In root mode, you can read and modify all files on your device, even protected ones.
If root access doesn’t work
If you see information in X-plore that your device seems to be not rooted, there are more possible causes:
- your device is really not rooted
In such case you can open Configuration in X-plore and configure Root access to Normal, which will list files in “Root” as normal files - the superuser app on device doesn’t allow X-plore to use root mode
Solution: open superuser manager app (SuperSu or similar) and configure it so that X-plore has root access
Do you need root access?
If you don’t know if you need root access to your device, then you probably don’t, and best advice is to not care. Android device works just fine without rooting.
Power-users probably skip entire this paragraph, since they know why they want rooted Android device.
Without root access, you can still open root folder on device (that is ”/”) and explore it, but only limited subset of files will be readable, because many files/folders in root partition are protected by permissions, so unreadable by X-plore.
Writing to read-only partitions
Some partitions on Android/Linux are mounted in read-only mode. Mostly system files are in such partitions, so that they can’t be modified even with root access.
Yet X-plore can write even in such partitions. You can set in Configuration if you want to use Superuser + mount writable mode. In such case, when writing to read-only partition, X-plore temporally mounts the partition as writable, and immediately after its work it mounts it back to read-only.
However note that there are more ways of rooting Android, and in “systemless root” mode, changes to system partitions are not possible, or changes are reverted after device reboot.
Folder icons
X-plore marks folders accessed in root mode with a dot. Purple dot on folder marks folder that is normally writable, while red dot marks folder that is read-only, so writable only in special mode as written above.
What are those folders under Root folder?
You may wonder what’s meaning of all the folders there, such as proc, data, sys, etc.
For typical Android user, these are of little interest. You may configure X-plore to completely hide Root folder.
For curious user, here is some explanation. Android is built on Linux operating system, so most folders in root folder are structured by Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. The folder names are their meaning is common to many Linux-based computers.
Android have some own folders added into there, notably:
- /data/ – here are saved all installed applications (APK), and in /data/data/ are application data for all apps on device
- /system/app/ and /system/priv-app/ contain preinstalled applications