The Motorola Moto E is here and it was only a matter of time before someone was able to work around its limitations. Now that a working, though unofficial, TWRP recovery is available for the device, owners of the extremely affordable smartphone can now get root access on the device as well.
The Moto E is almost as capable as the budget-friendly Moto G with an important difference: it is even budget-friendlier, with a $129 contract-free price tag compared to the Moto G’s $179. Of course, specs are somewhat lower, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200, 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of storage, and a 4.3-inch display. But with a near vanilla Android experience and an unlockable bootloader, the Moto E is probably the cheapest yet decent hackable Android device you can get your hands on.
That last part is now especially true with the unofficial TWRP recovery made for the Moto E, codenamed “condor”. And now that a custom recovery is available, the door is open for more tinkering. First up is root access, which can be gained by flashing SuperSU on the device. However, users don’t need to flash TWRP just to get root. If they want to keep their device’s stock recovery, they will need to fastboot TWRP and then flash SuperSU, preserving the original recovery while rooting the system at the same time.
Considering that this TWRP version is both young and still unofficial, there are a few issues. One known problem is that touch doesn’t work on TWRP until after the device has gone to sleep and then woken up again. Either method to gain root, whether by flashing TWRP or not, does require an unlocked bootloader first, which Motorola does officially support.
