Your Android phone can turn into a hacking device with just a few steps, having the ability to run tools like Nmap, Nikto, Netcat, and more without rooting the device.

This article will teach you how you can run a hacking operating system on your Android phone by using an application UserLAnd. This app is developed by UserLAnd Technologies to install Linux distributions on Android phones without any rooting. The app is available on the play store and is completely free. This application makes it possible to run the ARM64 Debian operating system with the current Android OS. The ARM architecture is the same used by the Kali Linux Raspberry Pi ARM images, which makes it easy to import Kali’s tool repository. Moreover, UserLAnd developers added a feature i.e. a dedicated Kali filesystem to import all necessaries repositories easily.

Still, we can not neglect the fact that UserLAnd is not an old project, and it might be possible that some tools like Nmap would break while executing several commands. The good news is their technical team is continuously working on resolving these issues.

How UserLAnd Works?

This application utilizes custom executables that allow creating the Debian and Ubuntu filesystems. One of the examples is PRoot which is open-source software that mimics the functionalities like chroot. PRoot will enable us to run code with an alternative root directory. In UserLAnd, PRoot is running in the background.

Installing the UserLAnd Application

The app is available on play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula&hl=en

You have to install it from there.

Creating a Filesystem

After completing the installation process, open UserLAnd and hit the “Apps” tab. From where you need to select “Kali” or “Debian”.

Create a Username

After selecting a distribution, few permissions would be required to permit.

Then you need to add a username, password, and a VNC password. The password will get you access to the SSH server after installing the filesystem. The “VNC password” will not use in this tutorial. Still, we need to fill this field.

Select a connection type. In our case, we will select SSH.

And now, it will take some time to download the necessary executables and scripts from its GitHub repository.

As soon as the unpacking of Kali Linux files is complete, we can create a Kali Linux instance and can communicate with it via SSH.

Run Kali Linux on Your Android Phone

You need to enter your password.

Now I am in Kali in UserLAnd and successfully loaded the Kali system on my Android phone.

At this point, if I try some basic commands like ‘ifconfig’ it does not work!

The reason is its installation process is already long with how many files it needs to download, so trying to get everything all at once is not going to work. What you need to do is update and upgrade all the packages from the Kali repository.

$ sudo apt-get update && apt upgrade

After completing this process, now hit any command like ‘ifconfig’, and it will work fine.

The filesystem in this device is limited and does not include several packages by default. You can install tools and packages of your choice like git, nano, curl, screen, wget, etc. All you have to do is type the command:

$ Sudo apt-get install [Package_name]

These packages help you to turn your Android phone into a high-tech hacking device.

Kali Linux Repository Error Fixed

Ok, so many times we have experienced this error in which apt-update and update-upgrade will not work when you freshly installed Kali Linux in your device. I have experienced the same error, I was unable to install any packages and could not connect to the Kali Linux repository. Whenever I try to update packages and connect to Kali repository I encountered errors like “temporary failure resolving ‘http.kali.org'” or “E : Unable to Locate Package”.

This error occurs generally due to the repository error i.e. “sources.list” file is either blank or is set up with a dead repository.

To fix this error all you need to do is browse the official website of Kali and search for Kali Network Repositories (/etc/apt/sources.list). you can browse this webpage from the link: https://www.kali.org/docs/general-use/kali-linux-sources-list-repositories/

They have shown that what entry should be present in your sources.list file. ​If the entry doesn’t exactly match up to the suggested entry, you may not be able to install any new additional packages or receive updates.

Kali Linux has different branches to choose from (take your time to read which one would be the best option for your setup), and you may be able to switch or include additional repositories.​kali-rolling that are frequently updated).

I have used the following command to fix that error:

$ echo “deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main non-free contrib” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list

After hitting the command, try to execute an apt-update and upgrade command, and it will work.

Wrapping Up The Article

We have seen in this article how you can run Kali Linux OS on your Android phones and turned them into hacking devices just by installing a free app UserLAnd. After setting up the Kali environment in your Android phone, you can learn how to hack websites, Wi-Fi passwords, and Windows 10. One thing that we need to keep in mind that the UserLAnd does have limitations. Without root access, Android’s Wi-Fi interface can’t be switched into monitor mode, so traditional Wi-Fi hacking tools like Aircrack-ng won’t work.

However, there’s still a lot that can be done with UserLAnd. Users find it more convenient to hit commands with a touch screen, no ads, so the application looks clean, and the performance can be maximal. The most important factor you do not need to root your Android device to run the basic operations of Kali.

You should also check the Top 10 things to Do After Installing Kali Linux.