Rooting the Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone is the first step towards device customization. There are a few areas of customizing a mobile device that root access officially opens up the ports to, including installing root requiring apps, custom ROMs and custom kernels. A custom ROM and custom kernel most likely will require root access to run, but it also requires a custom recovery to be installed. Having no custom recovery and just having root access alone will mean you are restricted to staying within the parameters of installing new applications that you otherwise couldn’t install before.

One of the root applications you can install on the Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone running on the Android 6.0 Marshmallow software update is the Pry-Fi app. We recommend every Z3 owner checks out the Pry-Fi application if you are interested in analyzing your WiFi network. The Pry-Fi application for Android is very similar to what Wireshark is for Linux and Windows.

Sony Xperia Z3

Files You Need

The is a unique rooting method for people with a locked bootloader and people with an unlocked bootloader. Choose the files below depending on whether your Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone has a locked or unlocked bootloader.

Files if your bootloader is locked:

  • Download the SuperSU beta 2.88 from here.
  • Download the  byeselinux_flashable.zip from here.
  • Download the the RICDefeat.zip from here.

Files for the unlocked bootloader here:

  • Download the Android Marshmallow beta root image that you can root from here.
  • Download the Systemless SuperSU from here.

Rooting the Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Locked bootloaders:

  1. Make sure you have flashed the Android 6.0 Marshmallow software update on your Z3 device.
  2. Flash the SuperSU beta 2.88 on your device.
  3. Flash the Bye SELinux file on your device.
  4. Flash the RICDefeat zip on your device.

Unlocked bootloaders:

  1. Download the marshmallow boot image that needs to be installed on your device from the files section above.
  2. Rename the file to “boot.img”.
  3. Install ADB on your Windows computer and then keep the adb folder open.
  4. Copy your boot.img file over to the same folder as your ADB.
  5. Connect the Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone to the computer with the USB cable.
  6. From within your ADB and boot image directory folder, hold the Shift key and right-click the mouse where there are no files in the folder and choose to open a new command prompt window from the menu.
  7. Flash the boot.img from the command line.
  8. Enter recovery mode and then flash the system-less SuperSU from the files section above.

In conclusion, that’s how to root the Sony Xperia Z3 smartphone when running on the Android 6.0 Marshmallow software update. You should find your Z3 device can install all the same root apps it could install the last time you had root access to the internal system. One of those applications will be the Pry-Fi WiFi network analyzer app we mentioned in the introduction.