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Rooted vs Stock

samaxe64

samaxe64

Lurker
Hey all,
I got a question what are the advantages and disadvantages when you root your phone? I was gonna dive headlong into it but figured I would ask first.
Does rooting your phone allow you to do more or make it easier to use verses stock? does it make the phone vulnerable to viruses?
 
I personally only rooted my phone once and am a rooting novice. I did so to get one specific feature. That feature was the ability to have the keyboard automatically switch to SwiftKey when the phone is in landscape and automatically switch to Swype when it is in portrait. At the time, the only way I could do this was with an app that required root.

I decided to take the plunge and root my phone and get this app. The app worked well, but I found the phone's responsiveness degraded over the course of days. I had to reboot to get the phone to work smoothly again. I did reboots weekly.

I finally had enough of the lagginess that develops every week. There was a new app that auto switched keyboards for non-rooted phones, so I unrooted it. The phone has been running smoothly since, but keyboard app did not work as well as the unrooted app. I have decided to keep my phone unrooted.

As a novice, I did the bare minimum to root my phone. It is possible that someone with better knowledge could have resolved the lagginess issue I experienced when I rooted my phone. I just lived with it at the time and now I don't have to deal with it anymore since I unrooted.

Generally, people who root their phones do so for more reasons than I. I will let others comment on their experience.
 
I've rooted every android device I've owned, and it'll continue to be one of the first things I do when I get a new one.

Reasons:
Root only apps (new functionality)
Custom ROMS (new customization/functionality options)
Custom kernels ( increased performance/battery life/functionality)
Nandroid backups ( complete backups of your entire phone. If something ever goes wrong, its like a time machine you hop back into ;))

Lastly...

Its my phone, and I want to be the one to decide what it can do and what it cant. :thumbup:
 
One risk of rooting and installing your own ROM is the possibility of bricking your phone.

It doesn't happen often, but it can. Make sure to find a good set of instructions for your phone and follow them.
 
Reasons I rooted? Titanium backup, nandroids, custom recoveries, Lightflow, things like that. Also for modifying system data.
 
Even if you feel you dont need any kind of advanced functionality of your device and perfectly content or even love the stock software of your device, rooting offers specific backup and security features that should appeal to just about everyone.

Once rooted you can run apps like Titanium Backup (TB) or Titanium Media Sync (TMS) - Titanium Backup & Titanium Media Sync for Android Official Website

TB allows you to backup apps and related data on your phone that you normally don't have access to, like game save data. It has options to sync your backups to a cloud provider like Box, DropBox, or Drive so your data is completely off your device which is vital in case you lose your device or it goes for a hard fall or swim.

TMS allows you to choose folders on your device, like your pictures or music folder, and it automatically syncs your precious pictures and such to DropBox. Once again your memories are safe as they are off your device. I will concede that root is not needed as there are other similar apps but TMS is very intelligent and can upload your content to any FTP server for that matter.

Full nandroid backups are possible with root, a nandroid backup is basically a photo copy of your device..all your apps, where they are located on your home screen, login settings for email and more.

If you ever lose your device or it breaks, with a nandroid backup you can replace the device with an exact same one, root it, then restore your nandroid backup and it's just like the day you made the backup. With a couple flicks of your finger Titanium Backup will pull down your app and data backups from your free cloud provider and restore your progress in your games and more.

Being rooted allows security suits like Avast Mobile Security to offer more protection - avast! Free Mobile Security | Antivirus & Anti-Theft App for Android mobile & tablet

With Avast Mobile Security on a rooted device it becomes difficult for someone to remove it from your phone and offers more features such as disabling usb debugging when you trigger it as stolen, pin protection to uninstall any app on your system, and the ability of the anti-theft module to survive a factory reset.

Beyond security you can extend the usefulness of your device like being able to connect a portable hard drive or USB stick to your device to watch a movie or transfer data with StickMount. Using your device to boot a fubar computer with DriveDroid which allows your device to host usb images like AVG rescue Disk, Hirens Boot CD, and even a complete Ubuntu or Knoppix linux OS.

Using TB you can freeze or uninstall all those crap programs cell phone service providers install on your phone that you will never use.

There are inherent security concerns with rooting as well, and the simplest way to make sure root access cannot be abused is to assign a pin number for granting root privileges, the best root manager is SuperSU and offers that feature in a free app.

I'm a huge fan of having a rooted device, and if your phone is a popular model you will find rooting it is actually quite easy and painless, not to mention you have a great community of knowledgeable folks here at Phandroid to help you along if you hit any snags or have any questions.

:thumbup:
 
before, the only reason I rooted was for backup capability. It's not needed anymore because of Helium. Now I use an unrooted device. Only my old phone got rooted so it can be updated to ICS. My little sister uses it now. :p
 
Sorry off topic but RXPERT i just tried PMing u this and it wouldnt send after me deleating 10xx pms. Any idea what my problem is mate

So i can no longer post pics on here using the AF app. I get a message like "ive exceeded my quota".
So how do i reset this quota or am i stuck with spending 10paragraphs that screenshot could replace lol.
Thanx bud :beer:
 
Stuntman said:
I personally only rooted my phone once am a rooting novice. I did so to get one specific feature. That feature was the ability to have the keyboard automatically switch to SwiftKey when the phone is in landscape and automatically switch to Swype when it is in portrait. At the time, the only way I could do this was with an app that required root.

I decided to take the plunge and root my phone and get this app. The app worked well, but I found the phone's responsiveness degraded over the course of days. I had to reboot to get the phone to work smoothly again. I did reboots weekly.

I finally had enough of the lagginess that develops every week. There was a new app that auto switched keyboards for non-rooted phones, so I unrooted it. The phone has been running smoothly since, but keyboard app did not work as well as the unrooted app. I have decided to keep my phone unrooted.

As a novice, I did the bare minimum to root my phone. It is possible that someone with better knowledge could have resolved the lagginess issue I experienced when I rooted my phone. I just lived with it at the time and now I don't have to deal with it anymore since I unrooted.

Generally, people who root their phones do so for more reasons than I. I will let others comment on their experience.
Click to expand...

Unless your method of rooting also changed your ROM, I find it hard to believe root caused your problem. All root does is give you admin access to your device.
 
Ask yourself what you need to do that actually requires root or if you just want to play with the phone. For most users it's probably the latter.

Android and hardware have come a long way. Storage space is usually adequate and a lot of customization is possible without root, far more than on an iPhone that is not jailbroken. For regular users there's just not as many things that require root as before. I haven't bothered to root my daily driver in a long time and nowadays usually recommend against it.

No offense to hard-working developers, but custom ROMs do vary some in terms of quality, stability, functionality and features.

Rooting will void your warranty. It also reduces the device security since you are using it with administrator rights, a basic security no-no.

If you decide you really do need/want to root, look in the 'All Things Root' section of your phone's subforum. Plenty of info is available. Also, Google search is your friend. Do a LOT of reading. It's possible a mistake could 'brick' your phone (make it unusable). Make sure you understand why you're doing it, the exact steps required and all the terminology, and have a recovery plan and backups in case things go bad. Nobody likes to bail out a n00b just because he simply failed to do his homework first.
 
Crashdamage said:
Ask yourself what you need to do that actually requires root or if you just want to play with the phone. For most users it's probably the latter.

Android and hardware have come a long way. Storage space is usually adequate and a lot of customization is possible without root, far more than on an iPhone that is not jailbroken. For regular users there's just not as many things that require root as before. I haven't bothered to root my daily driver in a long time and nowadays usually recommend against it.

No offense to hard-working developers, but custom ROMs do vary some in terms of quality, stability, functionality and features.

Rooting will void your warranty. It also reduces the device security since you are using it with administrator rights, a basic security no-no.

If you decide you really do need/want to root, look in the 'All Things Root' section of your phone's subforum. Plenty of info is available. Also, Google search is your friend. Do a LOT of reading. It's possible a mistake could 'brick' your phone (make it unusable). Make sure you understand why you're doing it, the exact steps required and all the terminology, and have a recovery plan and backups in case things go bad. Nobody likes to bail out a n00b just because he simply failed to do his homework first.
Click to expand...

Rooting does NOT always void your warranty, but a custom ROM can. I've sent two devices in a few times with custom ROM's or just plain root, and gotten warranty repair. It depends on the manufacturer.

Also, security no-no is true, but you can lock it with a PIN and things like that to make it harder to grant root access.
 
Security is only more of an issue for rooters if you grant things superuser access without understanding why its asking it.

Also, in the event something actually "infects" your device... id argue being rooted is a good thing because you can completely wipe the system and start fresh, or you can just restore the system to a point before the "infection"
 
pool_shark said:
Unless your method of rooting also changed your ROM, I find it hard to believe root caused your problem. All root does is give you admin access to your device.
Click to expand...

The rooting steps I followed involved downloading some thing to my computer, hooking my phone to my computer, unzipping and copying files to my phone and doing some special boot method. It's been a number of months and I don't remember exactly the steps in detail. I do recall that I had to use a method specific to my model of phone (Bell SGS3). The compatible method was the same as the AT&T version of the phone. There was also a step to backup my phone in case something went wrong.

I'm not sure if the rooting method changed my ROM or not. I'm not knowledgeable to know specifically what each step does. After rooting, my phone looked the same as before.

It is possible that the issues may be caused by Keyboard Manager. That was the app that automatically switched keyboards when the orientation changes. I did not try deactivating it when my phone was rooted as that app was the reason for rooting in the first place. I did not do any further investigation on the cause of the sluggishness over time.
 
I rooted because my phone has limited onboard storage (and it's laid out in a weird way, with limited space for apps) and Link2SD requires root access to work. It'll allow you to use a portion of your MicroSD card to effectively expand your internal storage space.
 
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