Shizuku

Shizuku does nothing on its own. It is a bridge: other apps use it to call Android’s system APIs with more rights than a normal app has, without the phone being rooted. On this site, Volume Manager, Install with Options, FireWall Blocks and WG Tunnel are among the apps that use it.

How it works

Normally an app asks the system for something, such as the list of installed apps, and the system checks whether that app is allowed. Apps that needed more used to run shell commands through su. The developer’s README calls that approach slow and unreliable, because it starts a new process for every command and has to parse text output.

Shizuku takes a different route. You start a small Shizuku server process once, as ADB or as root. Apps that support Shizuku then send their requests through it. The server passes them to the system with its own rights and hands back the result. To the app it looks almost the same as calling the system API directly.

Two consequences follow from that design:

• Started via ADB, it has ADB’s rights, not root’s. That is enough for many things (installing with options, changing secure settings, per-app network rules), but not everything.
• Each app has to ask you. Shizuku shows a permission prompt the first time an app wants to use it, and you can revoke access later.

Starting it

Since version 13.6.0, Shizuku can also start itself without root on Android 13 and later when the phone is connected to a trusted Wi-Fi network, according to its release notes.

Our step-by-step guide covers all three: How to start Shizuku, including what to do when it stops.

Which build this is

This is Shizuku from its developers, RikkaApps, in the version published on their GitHub releases, checked against IzzyOnDroid’s signed index. The project’s licence forbids forks from using the name “Shizuku” or the package name moe.shizuku.privileged.api, so an app with that name and package name signed by someone else is not the developers’ release. The signer fingerprint is under More Information below.

Shizuku is also on Google Play under the same package name. If Android refuses to install this APK over a copy you already have, the usual reason is that the two were signed with different keys. Uninstall the old copy first, then start Shizuku again.

The current release, 13.6.0, came out in May 2025 and is still the latest on the project’s GitHub.

Shizuku API. Uses the Shizuku API, so it can do ADB-level work without root once Shizuku is running. (rikka.shizuku.A0)

Flagged by IzzyOnDroid:

• UpstreamNonFree: The upstream source code is not entirely free software.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

We host the current version and the 2 before it. Each older file matches the checksum in IzzyOnDroid’s signed index and is signed with the same key as the current one, so newer versions install over it as normal updates. The permissions and trackers listed above describe the current version. Full changelog.