Root phone's for my mom... should i root it?

[mundane24]

just got this Reverb!

question is... should i bother rooting and installing a custom ROM on it? my mom will be the one using it. i prefer not messing with it if the phone by itself is already functioning properly and there are no known annoying bugs (wifi, gps, camera issues).

i used to do it with my triumph as I was its sole user and the triumph was just plagued with a bunch of bugs out of the box. if there's really no need to root and install custom rom on this phone, i might as well just leave it alone so that way my mom can just use it stock and do whatever she pleases with it (easy ota updates, etc etc).

thanks in advance!

btw i just ported my old number/account (and changed to a new phone number also). im hoping my $25 grandfathered plan sticks! *fingers crossed*

 

[El Presidente]

I suppose it's up to your mum, really

If she's happy with it and it works as it should, my guess would be no. If, after she's used it for a while, she's not happy with it I'd maybe look at a custom ROM to see if it would alleviate any issues.

If it was my mums phone, she'd probably say no.

 

[mundane24]

hmmm she's probably gonna be happy with it 'as is'. she only uses her phone to call and text. then occasional light games and picture taking.

i asked coz i thought it might have been like the motorola triumph which had several annoying bugs out of the box.

 

[Anamacha]

FWIW, I haven't noticed too many bugs with my SGR -- I've been using it a week or three, installed apps but still using stock ROMs, etc.

The phone has rebooted itself two or three times since I got it, had two or three inexplicable slowdowns, but nothing major. A reboot fixes it right up, so far anyway.

 

[ManWithCamera]

There's no way I would root a phone for my mother unless it had some pretty serious problems out of the box. The Reverb has been great for me. I'm still basically running it as stock, with root access so that I can run Titanium Backup and make the occasional screen shot. I'm also toying with running linux on Android, which requires root access, but my mom wouldn't do any of these things.

Because of rooting and removing some bloatware I can't install the update they keep trying to push onto my phone. That would drive my mother crazy and she'd be asking me to fix it. It's better for non-technical people to leave their phones as stock. If you modify someone else's phone you end up being responsible to support those changes.

I might consider rooting my wife's phone, if she ever gets an Android device, but only if she was really frustrated by something that I knew I could fix by rooting the device. My Samsung Intercept absolutely had to be rooted if you wanted to install more than just a couple of apps, since I had delete a bunch of bloatware and move a bunch of apps to the system partition, and move the dalvik cache to the cache partition just to have some room on the device. But the biggest problem with the Intercept was that it had 1/3 of the RAM that the Reverb has and so it couldn't do much more than one thing at a time (thus, if you were listening to a podcast, while using MapMyRun, and a phone call came in, you probably wouldn't be able to answer the call and most likely the phone would reboot).

The Reverb is a wonderful phone and works very well when left with the stock firmware.

 

[mundane24]

thanks for all the replies. im leaving it stock. the only thing she's got a gripe with is... she keeps getting drop calls!?!?! but whenever i test it, it seems fine. weird!