George “Geohot” Hotz, the legendary hacker who’s famous for his iPhone jailbreaks, has turned his attention to Android devices and released the first root for the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active. It’s quite possibly one of the easiest root methods you’ll ever come across, and it was developed in a matter of hours.

Rooting an Android handset usually requires you to download some files onto your Mac or PC, wipe your device, then play around in Terminal or the command prompt to make the magic happen. But Geohot’s root is much simpler.

All you have to do is visit a special website he’s set up (geohot.com/activeroot/) then tap a button to install an APK file. That’s pretty much all there is to it. I told you it was simple.

The Galaxy S4 Active has been available for just two weeks, but Geohot hasn’t been working on this hack for that long. According to the post he made on the XDA Developers forum, he picked up the device “on the way back from the beach” yesterday, then rooted it that afternoon.

It’s unclear whether Geohot will make similar roots available to other Android handsets, but we certainly hope so. Wouldn’t it be great if rooting all devices was this simple?

• SourceXDA Developers
• ViaRedmond Pie