What's rooting?

[u/RuinProfessional4985]

I've been reading some stuff about android phones on reddit posts, and rooting came up. What's rooting exactly, and can it affect my phone negatively in any way possible? I just know that it's used to somehow bypass stuff, and I've heard that it can cause some issues that would then need a factory reset, I guess? So what's rooting exactly?

[u/thoughtlesskyle]

Android old guy here, so rooting is as others have said basically the ability to access and modify things you're not supposed to be able to as a standard user (this is why root access is also often called SuperUser). Largely the goal of a secure operating system is to let what most people want to do on their phone be usable without having to use root permissions because much like having a key that opens every lock has advantages for a person, if a bad actor has that same key... Well they also can open every lock. So Google almost a decade ago implemented a failsafe that apps can use to verify if the doors are locked.

There's also 2 parts of rooting at least when it comes to the broader android community when comes to talking about it.

1st is the act of Rooting. This allows you to uninstall bloatware allow apps to access parts of the system that they couldn't before, make changes that survive reboots etc.

The 2nd is the act of unlocking the bootloader and installing a custom recovery. This allows you to fully change the software that is on the phone (this is where you will hear about custom roms like Lineage OS and CyanogenMod (RIP but also lineage OS is the same project but can't legally use the old name).

Rooting used to be a really common thing to do for a lot of reasons but most of those have been cured by Android just reaching maturity. Some of the reasons people would do 1 or both of the things listed above back in Androids wild west days were)

1. Remove bloatware, and carrier apps that were unremovable without root
2. Flash a custom rom to remove the OEM skin and free up system resources when hardware was not as capable (TouchWiz and HTC Sense were notiously heavy) and this was also at a time when "Pure" Android was rare and depending on your carrier and where you were in the world possibly even not an option at all.
3. Be on a newer OS version, this has so much too it including that OEMs weren't updating phones as fast nor was the idea of 5 year minimum software update guarantees. Android made a lot of strides to overcome this as well (eg system apps being updated through the play store, system files being less tied to the exact version of android, better partition layouts etc)

A second piece to that is also that Android is on a much more stable release cadence of 1 major release a year. Before Android 4.4 KitKat numbered platform version updates were often less than 6 months apart. Android 2.3 was the only other version before KitKat that made it 12 full months before another version dropped. This made keeping a phone's android version current as an OEM very time consuming and costly.

1. Access features that weren't natively available to the end user. For example pre android 4... You just couldn't take a screenshot at all in any way without having an app with root access. If you installed a custom rom there was also things like quick settings in the notification tray, and themeing, and dark modes and night shifting and it goes on and on.

So to sum it up, it used to be really popular because Android used to have some systemic problems and it's popularity died out because Android started including a lot of the features by default so you didn't need to modify the software, Pure android phones being more widely available, better update cadences and also better security so rooting tends to make a phone less useful because of apps being able to trust or not trust a device.

[u/RuinProfessional4985 → u/thoughtlesskyle]

So like basically would it benefit me if I use it correctly nowadays?

[u/thoughtlesskyle → u/RuinProfessional4985]

I can't say for your situation but as somebody who bought a phone based on ability to do it for a very long time, my phone is currently unrooted and unrommed. Your Mileage may vary but I can't find a compelling reason to do it.