The CF-Auto-Root one-click rooting files by Chainfire are typically available for Samsung devices, so when the news broke yesterday that Chainfire had released an official CF-Auto-Root tool for the Google Pixel and the Google Pixel XL smartphones, the news came as a bit of a surprise.

The CF-Auto-Root tool manages to get the SuperSU that is also developed by Chainfire successfully installed and enabled on the Google Pixel smartphones without the need of having a custom recovery image installed beforehand. What is more, there is no custom recovery image left overriding the stock recovery partition when the rooting is complete. The result is you get to install any of the root applications that you wanted to try that take advantage of having the full write permissions over the root directory on the Android operating system—something that is always there on Android thanks to it being based on the Linux kernel but is taken away from us by the Android developers, so you don’t get it by default like you would if you were running a Linux distributions such as Ubuntu from a desktop environment.

REQUIREMENTS

• You need to have the Google Pixel smartphone to flash the version of the CF-Auto-Root tool that is available in this guide and not one of the other smartphones or tablets that run Android Nougat, including any other device in the Pixel’s range such as the Google Pixel XL.

BEFORE WE BEGIN

• You should unlock the Developer Options menu on the Google Pixel smartphone so you can then enable the USB Debugging Mode and thus allow for the Android operating system to allow the necessary changes to be made to it which are a requirement for the rooting to work.
• You should install the Google USB Drivers on the computer for the Google Pixel smartphone if the USB Drivers are not installed on the computer already, so the computer can identify the Pixel handset and allow for the flashing of the rooting file to occur.

HOW TO ROOT GOOGLE PIXEL SMARTPHONES RUNNING ANDROID 7.1 NOUGAT BY USING THE CF-AUTO-ROOT TOOL BY CHAINFIRE

1. Download the CF-Auto-Root tool for the Google Pixel when you have it running on the Android 7.1 Nougat software updates.
2. Open up the default download location on the computer ( which is typically the Downloads folder on Windows operating systems) and extract the rooting file to that folder.
3. Boot the Google Pixel smartphone into the Fastboot Mode and then connect it to the computer with the USB cable that is used to charge the device’s battery.
4. Run the rooting file that is available after you extracted it earlier to the default download location and then follow the on-screen guidelines to complete the rooting of the smartphone.

In conclusion, that is all you need to root Google Pixel smartphones when they are running on the Android 7.1 Nougat software updates by flashing the CF-Auto-Root tool by Chainfire. It’s important to note that at the time of writing this guide the rooting files for the Google Pixel and the Google Pixel XL are not working correctly and Chainfire still has some work to do. He doesn’t go into great detail about what needs fixing or what you can expect, but you can read all of the information he wrote about the topic on his social media page here.

Be aware that there is a version of the SuperSU available to root the Android 7.1 version at the time of writing this guide, but there is no official TWRP Recovery provided by Team Win just yet, and thus you should not try flashing that version of the SuperSU because it’s not going to work.