THREAD TEMPORARILY "PAUSED"
We're talking/reporting in circles without progress, and nobody is reading back more than a page, so it's hard to see where things stand - the thread just grows and grows with everybody saying the same thing.
If you came here to report v2.80 or v2.81 isn't working for you: thank you, we are aware of the issues, we are working on it.
v2.80 release had a few major issues, causing root loss on many older devices and bootloops on Xperias. These issues are under investigation. There was a staged roll-out, and at the first stage no issues were reported. Unfortunately now that there are issues, due to a recent change in the Developer Console for the Play store we can't just un-publish v2.80 and put v2.79 back.
v2.81 was released quickly in an attempt to reduce the number of users affected by these issues, but it doesn't improve the situation by that much. It is also a franken-merge between v2.79 and v2.80 so it's hard to use as a base. The effort to fix the issues will thus be based on v2.80 itself.
Those of you who had any issues with v2.80 and v2.81
and are willing to help find and fix them, please report to the
SuperSU BETA thread. I am especially looking for Xperia users who had bootloop issues and are willing to assist finding the cause.
My personal advice would be to stick to
SR3-SuperSU-v2.79-SR3-20170114223742.zip for the moment. In the mean time, we're hard at work getting to the bottom of the problems.
If you have lost root, quite probably you will need to fully re-root with an older SuperSU version (such as v2.79-SR3). Updating to a newer APK or downgrading to an older APK will
not fix the issue. If you flash an older SuperSU version and the application itself becomes invisible, 'adb uninstall eu.chainfire.supersu' often fixes that specific problem.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, please have some patience while we try to work things out. SuperSU has dozens of millions of users across thousands of device/firmware combinations, there will always be some issue with an update, and sometimes (like today) they're worse than average. It happens.
NOTE: Some are complaining about the new permissions in v2.8x. These are used for the bug feedback screen. They do seem a bit excessive, I'm pretty sure we can drop some of them with the same functionality, but my current priority is to get the show-stoppers fixed. For more information about that and analytics (not currently used), please see my post
here.
Specific issues seen with v2.80
Updating binaries fails and root is lost, on older Android versions such as 4.4
This problem has been found and will be addressed. This should no longer happen with the test versions linked below, but you will still need to fully re-root if you lost it.
Updating binaries reports success, but devices loops on next reboot
Seems to be limited to Sony Xperia so far.
Cause unknown!
AdAway cannot update hosts file, and bind mounts do not work
This problem has been found and will be addressed. You can
temporarily bypass the problem by disabling '
mount namespace separation' in SuperSU's settings. For security reasons that's a setting that you would normally keep turned on. After next update, you should re-enable this option. The 'bindfix' test version linked below should fix this.
Application not responding error or crash of SuperSU on network state change
We have a good idea where this issue comes from. You may be able to get rid of it by manually uninstalling SuperSU (the APK only, not full un-root), rebooting, then re-installing the APK.
Test versions
There are some test versions available at
https://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=72429329&postcount=9810 for the adventurous.
UPDATE: v2.82
v2.82 has started staged roll-out on Google Play. You can download the ZIP and APK directly from the 'test versions' link above already.
This should solve the biggest root loss issues, but Xperia users should stay on v2.79 for the moment.
Further information will be available soon, this post will be updated, and the thread will be unlocked for further discussion.