Root Bloatware?

[Noles1724]

So I'm a first time owner of a droid phone (as of tomorrow ) but I do know that these phones come with a ton of preloaded apps that I want nothing to do with, and by reading this forum it seems to me the only way to get the bloatware off the phone has something to do with "root", "Brick"..

So I guess my newb question is what does it really mean to "root" a phone (looking for Rooting for Dummies terminology) and does it need to occur to remove apps such as cityid, vzw garbage apps.. and maybe more importantly will the removal of these apps help my battery life? Was playing around with a friends phone (Thunderbolt) and round that when I selected Advanced Task Killer, that a lot of apps that were never used appeared to be running, and many of them seemed to be bloatware that was preinstalled on the phone.

Thanks for the help guys and I'm very excited to start playing in the android world (BIONIC).

From BB, to Windows, and now to Android. I refuse to be a sheep and follow the Apple Herd.

 

[WA_Bob]

Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of Android! One thing everyone will tell you first is that Rooting isn't for everyone and there are risks of Bricking your phone whenever you do it. So spend plenty of time reading up and asking questions before you go ahead and do it - the only dumb one is the one you didn't ask!

Here's a few places to start reading up and getting the computer software you'll need to get started with:

This is from this Forum here: http://androidforums.com/bionic-all-things-root/413871-motorola-droid-bionic-all-things-root-guide-updated-11-1-11-a.html

This is a thread from another forum with mostly the same info, but another good reference: ROOT/UNROOT Droid Bionic - RootzWiki

Have fun and enjoy!

 

[Thom]

So I'm a first time owner of a droid phone (as of tomorrow ) but I do know that these phones come with a ton of preloaded apps that I want nothing to do with, and by reading this forum it seems to me the only way to get the bloatware off the phone has something to do with "root", "Brick"..

So I guess my newb question is what does it really mean to "root" a phone (looking for Rooting for Dummies terminology) and does it need to occur to remove apps such as cityid, vzw garbage apps.. and maybe more importantly will the removal of these apps help my battery life? Was playing around with a friends phone (Thunderbolt) and round that when I selected Advanced Task Killer, that a lot of apps that were never used appeared to be running, and many of them seemed to be bloatware that was preinstalled on the phone.

Thanks for the help guys and I'm very excited to start playing in the android world (BIONIC).

From BB, to Windows, and now to Android. I refuse to be a sheep and follow the Apple Herd.

I tried to answer the question of what Root means in ... http://androidforums.com/motorola-droid-bionic/473325-rooting-problems.html#post3732725.

You can have a lot of fun experimenting with alternatives to the Motorola/Verizon software solution and share that information with other interested people.

You can make a lot of assumptions that are wrong and end up shooting yourself in the foot. The protection for this is to have an absolute backup that you can revert to if you find yourself in that situation. Others can tell you how successful they have been in creating an absolute backup.

When going from one sanctioned release of the system to the next sanctioned release of the system (supplied directly from Motorola/Verizon) the process checks for the existence of a lot of software on the current (old) system and will fail if it doesn't find it.

As a result it is a bad idea to ever delete any of it (bloatware). Instead you use a third-party app and "freeze" it preventing it from ever running but still leaving it installed.

The big difference between the un-root-ed world and the root-ed world is that in the root-ed world you assume the responsibility for whatever happens. Don't expect Motorola/Verizon to come to your rescue. You will spend a lot of time in forums like this one digging out the answers.

I strongly recommend that you do some research before root-ing.

... Thom