What's Up Android Community?!

[AmondBry]

Armand here from NJ.

Been an Android user only since late summer of 2012, and since have really loved it. Started with a simple Metro PCS Samsung admire, and just over this past holiday season added (2) Nabi 2 tablets for the children, Kindle Fire HD for the girlfriend, an Asus Nexus 7 for myself, and have my eye on an Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T in the near future.

Currently a novice at this Android game, but I'm looking to seriously deepen my knowledge of this OS as quickly as possible. I'm coming from a windows background, but I'm not so sure I like their latest windows 8 UI.

I just pulled off Rooting one of the Nabi tablets and putting Play Store on it. However I'm not even schooled on why rooting is a benefit. I just knew it had to happen in order to get Play Store on the device.

This forum has been a major go-to over the past few moths for me, so I figured I might as well register for specific help with a few issues I've had.

Glad to be here, and looking forward to gaining some knowledge here.

thanx in advance

 

[olbriar]

It's a pleasure to welcome you to Android Forums AmondBry. I suspect you already know you way about these forums. Please give a shout if you need a link. I want to express my thanks for joining this community. I hope you will enjoy it even more as a member. Enjoy....

 

[El Presidente]

Howdy AmondBry, glad you decided to join up and really happy you've found us useful so far.

 

[The_Chief]

Hi and welcome to Android Forums!

Rooting isn't really the big special hairy deal a lot of people make it out to be. It's simply the key that unlocks the device's protected system files. But that's important if you want to really customize it: with root, you can remove bloatware, modify the processor's performance or even replace the entire operating system with a new one (we call them custom ROMs).

One of the most important things I'VE found to do with root is to flash a custom Recovery image - ClockworkMod or TWRP being two I can think of - that allows nandroid backups. A nandroid is a snapshot image of your device's entire current state, as it is at that moment, compressed and saved in a .zip file on the SD card or internal memory. If you delete the wrong thing or something else goes bad in a process that completely borks the device, you can always boot into recovery, wipe the device and restore the nandroid... it'll be like nothing ever happened.

As you start into your rooting journey, please remember this:

Always, Always, ALWAYS make a nandroid backup before doing anything fancy to your device. You want a good, recent place to get back to if something goes wrong.

Enjoy your stay here, and it's great to have you aboard!