TWRP’s Official App is out in PlayStore

CUSTOM ROM ENTHUSIASTS BROWSING OUR FORUMS PRIOR TO 2011 MIGHT REMEMBER THE DAYS OF REPEATEDLY CLICKING THE VOLUME AND POWER BUTTON TO GET ANYTHING DONE IN RECOVERY.

This was before the advent of touchscreen-enabled custom recoveries, of course, which are ubiquitous today. Leading the pack is Team Win’s Recovery Project (TWRP), which supports virtually every device with an unlocked bootloader and features custom themes, custom scripts, and powerful partition management options all wrapped up in a simple UI designed for ease of use.

But despite how user-friendly TWRP itself is, updating the recovery would require manually downloading the latest TWRP recovery image from their website onto your internal storage and flashing it over the fastboot protocol or within TWRP. Although there are a few fairly popular third-party applications on the Play Store that promise the ability to update the recovery partition without fastboot or recovery use, many of us prefer to use first-party applications in order to support the original developers. For the past 5 years of TWRP’s existence, such an option has not been available. Today, however, the official TWRP application launches on the Google Play Store!

TWRP’s Official App

Available starting today on the Play Store and soon as an APK directly from TWRP’s website, the Official TWRP App is the first app that was developed by Team Win’s Dees_Troy for the explicit purpose of maintaining TWRP. The app is free to use without any advertisements and does not require Google Play Services. Its main features include the ability to find and download the latest TWRP image for your device, flash said image to the recovery partition (requires root), and flash downloaded boot images to the boot partition (requires root).

As shown in the screenshots above, the app allows you to quickly find the latest TWRP image for your phone. In order to download the recovery image, you are temporarily re-directed to the TWRP website’s download page for the image, but upon returning to the app you can quickly use the built-in file manager to find and select the downloaded image. Prior to flashing the image, you are given a final confirmation dialog in case you selected the wrong partition to flash to. Once you hit “okay” the TWRP app will automatically flash the image to the recovery partition using superuser access. If you downloaded a boot image from our forums and wish to flash that, you can use the built-in file manager to find, select, and flash the boot image to the boot partition, all the same, using this app.

Finally, in the settings menu, you have the ability to check for TWRP updates in the background. You can select to check for an update once every day (default) or every other day depending on your preferences.

For those of you not familiar with TWRP, it offers hardcore Android smartphones users quite a few features, including a way to flash custom ROMs, install ZIP-file-based updates, create and restore backups of ROMS and much more.