Previously, we use either BroadcastReceivers or Activities to receive
messages from our native daemon, but both have their own downsides.
Some OEMs blocks broadcasts if the app is not running in the background,
regardless of who the caller is. Activities on the other hand, despite
working 100% of the time, will steal the focus of the current foreground
app, even though we are just doing some logging and showing a toast.
In addition, since stubs for hiding Magisk Manager is introduced, our
only communication method is left with the broadcast option, as
only broadcasting allows targeting a specific package name, not a
component name (which will be obfuscated in the case of stubs).
To make sure root requests will work on all devices, Magisk had to do
some experiments every boot to test whether broadcast is deliverable or
not. This makes the whole thing even more complicated then ever.
So lets take a look at another kind of component in Android apps:
ContentProviders. It is a vital part of Android's ecosystem, and as far
as I know no OEMs will block requests to ContentProviders (or else
tons of functionality will break catastrophically). Starting at API 11,
the system supports calling a specific method in ContentProviders,
optionally sending extra data along with the method call. This is
perfect for the native daemon to start a communication with Magisk
Manager. Another cool thing is that we no longer need to know the
component name of the reciever, as ContentProviders identify themselves
with an "authority" name, which in Magisk Manager's case is tied to the
package name. We already have a mechanism to keep track of our current
manager package name, so this works out of the box.
So yay! No more flaky broadcast tests, no more stupid OEMs blocking
broadcasts for some bizzare reasons. This method should in theory
work on almost all devices and situations.
Running broadcast tests from the app does not accurately verifies
whether the broadcasts can be delivered when the app is not running in
the foreground, which is why we are running the test.
The only sane way to verify broadcasts is to trigger the broadcast test
directly from the daemon on boot complete. If it is not deliverable,
then activity mode shall be chosen.
In the meantime, cleanup AndroidManifest.xml
- increase SignBoot bootimg header version maximum from 4 to 8 (upstream AOSP is already at 3) and make a variable for future ease
- hdr read size of 1024 bytes was too small as hdr_v1 and hdr_v2 have increased the used header page areas to 1632 and 1648 bytes, respectively, so raise this to the minimum page size of 2048 and also make a variable for future ease
- do not return "not signed" for all caught exceptions, show StackTrace for future debugging then still return false for script purposes
- correct "test keys" boot image signing strings (scripts and app) to "verity keys"
On API 23+, the platform unifies the way to handle drawable
resources across processes: all drawables can be passed via Icon.
This allows us to send raw bitmap to the system without the need to
specify a resource ID. This means that we are allowed to NOT include
these drawable resources within our stub APK, since our full APK can
draw the images programmatically and send raw bitmaps to the system.
