What I noticed is that you can work around the "need root part" for the usigned app.
If you want to login to your google account and play with the mods, download the signed app, extract a file from your android data folder and after completing the tutorial put it back in the same place so your data is still there. I tried it myself and it worked. If you need help with the data moving go to this thread on reddit, the whole tutorial is there.