Oculus — a part of Facebook Meta makes some great VR headsets for gaming. The Oculus Go was a standalone VR headset from the company which was discontinued last year in favor of the Oculus Quest 2. If you’re familiar with the way standalone VR headsets work, you would be aware of the fact that they run a version of Android. The Oculus Go also belongs to that category. Given that it runs a build of Android, there’s now a way to (partially) root your Oculus Go.
You might be wondering what’s the use of rooting something like a VR headset. Well, Oculus itself made an unlocked version of its OS available for the Oculus Go in order to support development. The unlocked OS build can be used to repurpose the now old hardware of the Oculus Go for something else. This is similar to unlocking the bootloader of your phone to make modifications to the system like gaining root access, installing a custom ROM, etc.
Building on this, ChinaLinda, a user who has been trying to gain root access on the Oculus Go for a while now has finally managed to achieve it, at least partially. The root has been achieved via Chainfire’s SuperSU which hasn’t been updated for a while but it’s the only way to gain root access on the Oculus Go as of now. Magisk, the tool that is widely used to gain root access to most Android devices is still broken on the Oculus Go and will not patch into the boot partition.
If you have an Oculus Go and want to make system-level modifications, you can head over to the git and follow the instructions to root the Oculus Go via ADB. Note that it just works partially as of now and gaining full root access might need more time or an alternate method.
