Back in the day - rooting Android phones and installing custom ROMs were such a big part of Android. I remember so well using titanium backup and Greenify and Cyanogenmod and the list goes on.
Is it still necessary to root in 2023 though?
I have been on vanilla Android without root access for the past couple of years and at this point most root features have made it into the vanilla Android OS. What are your thoughts?
I did with my old samsung, motorola, asus, nokia. But my last phone, PoCo F3, no, especially because it’s difficult to have a working Google Wallet with unlocked bootloader/root. I did it with my asus zenphone and nokia, but damn it broke every few weeks with a google update, and you needed to patch after patch after faking stuff and magisk addons etc for it to run a couple of weeks and BAM! Google Pay was disabled again… very annoying.
On my F3 I disabled/uninstalled unwanted apps with a debloater and I’m using Firefox for browsing. No need to root yet. When I’ll change phone I’ll root the old one.
Quite to the contrary, my phone doesn’t even support rooting. Neither TWRP or any other alternative bootloader is written for the Motorola G73, and an image file isn’t available to use with Magisk. I would love to root my phone, if I could.
I’ve been a flashaholic since the CWM days, but I haven’t rooted since probably 2017 or so. Back in the day, rooting was practically necessary for a good UX, but Android’s matured enough now that I haven’t had the need for a few years.
Same. I still try to buy phones with ROM support in case something goes sideways, but I haven’t used a custom ROM on my daily phone since 2016 or 2017 — and if I were to flash a custom ROM today, I still likely wouldn’t root it. Things typically work well enough that jumping through hoops to un-break SafetyNet for banking and mobile payments and even some games is too much trouble.
Ah, good old clockwork mod. Back when installing a custom rom was simple. Unlock boot loader, flash custom recovery, use recovery to install rom and wipe, done! None of this a/b partition and “you have to be on this specific version of stock rom to Flash this” crap. Those were the days.
Necessary for what? If you want to block ads system-wide, you can use the Private DNS feature. But to fiddle with system partition/install Xposed stuff you definitely need root
Adguard has ad blocking DNS servers. They can be a little slow however. Cloudflare and cleanbrowsing both have anti-malware DNS. Cloudflare being the fastest. There are other options too.
I used to root my phone, run custom ROMs and tweaks, the whole thing. Was basically forced to keep stock when I got a galaxy S8, and now I haven’t rooted even with my past few pixels, it doesn’t feel useful anymore. I might root my pixel 5 in the future as I plan to keep it for a long time, but right now I’m stock
The big thing now is Graphene OS on the Pixels. It is a custom ROM that works exactly like an OEM. The reason this works is because the Pixels ship with the same type of cryptographic hardware security chip as modern computers with TPM/secure boot. This chip makes it possible to create a verified chain of trust in the device so that Graphene can do over the air updates to the device. The ROM is configured with root disabled and the full Android 3 party lockdown user space for regular operations. You still have root through developer mode and USB if you need it. I’ve done custom ROMs for many years in the past, but nothing compares to the Graphene experience. As far as I am concerned, Graphene’s list of supported devices is the entire list of available phones I will consider purchasing.
I keep my Android phone rooted because there’s specific functionality that I use daily that’s a pain to do without root.
It’s not my primary phone so the fact that it’s 3 years out of date in order to preserve my root doesn’t bother me. But if it was my primary phone I’d probably look into workarounds to avoid needing root.
I haven’t rooted in a long time. But if you tell me there is an app out there that can restrict or deny apps background usage (to increase deep sleep state %) and that you can only do it with root.
Then I’d say root might be necessary in those situations.
For example WhatsApp is the number one standby battery drainer in my phone. If I check partial wakelocks like 70% of them have the WhatsApp logo. (In BBS app).
If I had a way to reduce them by 90% just keeping new messages and call working and root is needed for that then I’d want to root my phone.
I tried “Apps Ops” and it let me deny some of the permission. But maybe there is something more restrictive out there that needs root.
But isn’t Greenify outdated or they still update it?
Another thing I’m thinking: I’m interested in running some adb shell command every few minutes or hours to change the WhatsApp standby bucket from active to working_set that seems to reduce a lot of wakelocks.
Currently my standby (after tweaking for days) is not that bad. Like 0.4% per hour at night using wifi when I go to sleep.
WhatsApp despite of the restrictions I added is still the app with most partial wakelocks.
But generally apps that do something more advanced get outdated every year with new android versions with different permissions and API. This is why I was asking.
But I guess this app has nothing that got impacted.
I haven’t fucked with my daily driver phones for like 5 years. Sometimes I’ll use apps like YouTube revanced or something for music… But honestly I can even do without that and get by with newpipe.
I used to root all my phones going back to the HTC Incredible. You had to, if you wanted great UI, or locked-out functionally like wifi hotspotting.
These days my phone does everything I want right out of the box.
I guess I’d still consider rooting on order to do a debloat, but with onboard storage being what it is, I really don’t care that I’m only disabling and hiding the bloat.
I haven’t felt a need to root a phone in years. These days you will get a usable UI and UX with basically all major brands and adblock can be done without root, so it’s just not worth the hassle trying to hide the fact that you’re rooted from banking apps etc. At least as far as I’m concerned, I’m sure that some people still see a benefit in rooting.
Edit: I actually just thought of a reason: updates once the phone is past its official support window but otherwise still functional (though you don’t technically need root for that, just an unlocked bootloader, the new ROM doesn’t need to be rooted either strictly speaking). I’d just buy a new phone, but that really just means I’m a part of the e-waste problem.
Most of the features that drew me to root my phone back in the day (2012 to 2015) are now in my phone by default. They’ve been adopted by OEMs as part of their official skins so it’s not really necessary to root anymore.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
I did with my old samsung, motorola, asus, nokia. But my last phone, PoCo F3, no, especially because it’s difficult to have a working Google Wallet with unlocked bootloader/root. I did it with my asus zenphone and nokia, but damn it broke every few weeks with a google update, and you needed to patch after patch after faking stuff and magisk addons etc for it to run a couple of weeks and BAM! Google Pay was disabled again… very annoying.
On my F3 I disabled/uninstalled unwanted apps with a debloater and I’m using Firefox for browsing. No need to root yet. When I’ll change phone I’ll root the old one.
Quite to the contrary, my phone doesn’t even support rooting. Neither TWRP or any other alternative bootloader is written for the Motorola G73, and an image file isn’t available to use with Magisk. I would love to root my phone, if I could.
I’ve been a flashaholic since the CWM days, but I haven’t rooted since probably 2017 or so. Back in the day, rooting was practically necessary for a good UX, but Android’s matured enough now that I haven’t had the need for a few years.
Same. I still try to buy phones with ROM support in case something goes sideways, but I haven’t used a custom ROM on my daily phone since 2016 or 2017 — and if I were to flash a custom ROM today, I still likely wouldn’t root it. Things typically work well enough that jumping through hoops to un-break SafetyNet for banking and mobile payments and even some games is too much trouble.
For what it’s worth, fixing safetynet is like a module or two and a couple reboots.
Ah, good old clockwork mod. Back when installing a custom rom was simple. Unlock boot loader, flash custom recovery, use recovery to install rom and wipe, done! None of this a/b partition and “you have to be on this specific version of stock rom to Flash this” crap. Those were the days.
Nope
deleted by creator
Necessary for what? If you want to block ads system-wide, you can use the Private DNS feature. But to fiddle with system partition/install Xposed stuff you definitely need root
What DNS do you recommend?
Adguard has ad blocking DNS servers. They can be a little slow however. Cloudflare and cleanbrowsing both have anti-malware DNS. Cloudflare being the fastest. There are other options too.
I personally use NextDNS, but there are plenty of great options
nextdns, ControlD, Rethink DNS and AdGuard all have free tiers with adblocking capabilities and DoT.
1.1.1.1
No 1.1.1.2 and 1.0.0.2 No reason not to use the secure ones.
I used to root my phone, run custom ROMs and tweaks, the whole thing. Was basically forced to keep stock when I got a galaxy S8, and now I haven’t rooted even with my past few pixels, it doesn’t feel useful anymore. I might root my pixel 5 in the future as I plan to keep it for a long time, but right now I’m stock
I stopped rooting when I got my first Pixel. It didn’t feel necessary any more. Most of the things I rooted my phone for were just there now.
I haven’t even thought about rooting a phone in probably 10 years now.
The big thing now is Graphene OS on the Pixels. It is a custom ROM that works exactly like an OEM. The reason this works is because the Pixels ship with the same type of cryptographic hardware security chip as modern computers with TPM/secure boot. This chip makes it possible to create a verified chain of trust in the device so that Graphene can do over the air updates to the device. The ROM is configured with root disabled and the full Android 3 party lockdown user space for regular operations. You still have root through developer mode and USB if you need it. I’ve done custom ROMs for many years in the past, but nothing compares to the Graphene experience. As far as I am concerned, Graphene’s list of supported devices is the entire list of available phones I will consider purchasing.
Can you use Google Wallet and tap to pay with it?
deleted by creator
Yeah but if I cannot tap to pay, it’s a no for me…
I’ve used GrapheneOS and liked it, now I’m playing around with /e/os
I keep my Android phone rooted because there’s specific functionality that I use daily that’s a pain to do without root.
It’s not my primary phone so the fact that it’s 3 years out of date in order to preserve my root doesn’t bother me. But if it was my primary phone I’d probably look into workarounds to avoid needing root.
On modern A/B devices, Magisk can preserve root through OTA updates. The procedure is:
Not always. I tried that on my last OTA for my Pixel 7 and got locked out until it finally booted from slot_a after being off a while. Failed update.
I haven’t rooted in a long time. But if you tell me there is an app out there that can restrict or deny apps background usage (to increase deep sleep state %) and that you can only do it with root.
Then I’d say root might be necessary in those situations.
For example WhatsApp is the number one standby battery drainer in my phone. If I check partial wakelocks like 70% of them have the WhatsApp logo. (In BBS app). If I had a way to reduce them by 90% just keeping new messages and call working and root is needed for that then I’d want to root my phone.
I tried “Apps Ops” and it let me deny some of the permission. But maybe there is something more restrictive out there that needs root.
I’d check out Greenify, it has root and nonroot modes. I’ve found it to greatly increase my deep sleep when used religiously even without root
But isn’t Greenify outdated or they still update it?
Another thing I’m thinking: I’m interested in running some adb shell command every few minutes or hours to change the WhatsApp standby bucket from active to working_set that seems to reduce a lot of wakelocks.
Currently my standby (after tweaking for days) is not that bad. Like 0.4% per hour at night using wifi when I go to sleep.
WhatsApp despite of the restrictions I added is still the app with most partial wakelocks.
Looks like it hasn’t had updates since 2019, but if it ain’t broke why fix it?
Yeah I agree with that.
But generally apps that do something more advanced get outdated every year with new android versions with different permissions and API. This is why I was asking.
But I guess this app has nothing that got impacted.
I haven’t fucked with my daily driver phones for like 5 years. Sometimes I’ll use apps like YouTube revanced or something for music… But honestly I can even do without that and get by with newpipe.
Not at all.
I used to root all my phones going back to the HTC Incredible. You had to, if you wanted great UI, or locked-out functionally like wifi hotspotting.
These days my phone does everything I want right out of the box.
I guess I’d still consider rooting on order to do a debloat, but with onboard storage being what it is, I really don’t care that I’m only disabling and hiding the bloat.
I haven’t felt a need to root a phone in years. These days you will get a usable UI and UX with basically all major brands and adblock can be done without root, so it’s just not worth the hassle trying to hide the fact that you’re rooted from banking apps etc. At least as far as I’m concerned, I’m sure that some people still see a benefit in rooting.
Edit: I actually just thought of a reason: updates once the phone is past its official support window but otherwise still functional (though you don’t technically need root for that, just an unlocked bootloader, the new ROM doesn’t need to be rooted either strictly speaking). I’d just buy a new phone, but that really just means I’m a part of the e-waste problem.
Most of the features that drew me to root my phone back in the day (2012 to 2015) are now in my phone by default. They’ve been adopted by OEMs as part of their official skins so it’s not really necessary to root anymore.