What Is Android Rooting?

You must have wondered people talking about Android Rooting. But do you know what is Android Rooting? In this article we will discuss all aspects of rooting your Android.

What is Android Rooting?

Android Rooting or getting root or rooting your Android phone is nothing but the process to modify the operating system which is shipped with your purchased Android device so as to award you complete control over it.

Manufacturers and carriers put certain limitations on the phone while selling them in the market. B rooting you can overcome those limitations and extend the system functionalities. Rooting also helps in removing bloatware and installing Custom ROMs.

Word ‘root’ is actually used in Linux OS for the most privileged user just like an Administrator in Windows.

Rooting is usually simple. For most of the cases you will get useful videos and articles on internet that will explain how to root a specific phone model. To search how to root your Android device just search “Yourphonemodel root”.
Rooting process is not something permitted by manufacturers or carriers but they can’t even avert it from happening because the process of rooting usually exploits susceptibility in the Android OS code or in the device drivers which permits the ‘hacker’ to upload a program known as su where su stands for switch user. Su is the program which provides root access to the programs.
There is another program named Superuser Permissions which is usually bundled with all of the root methods. Superuser Permissions gives user a chance to approve or deny requests from any app that requests to utilize root. This program replaces the conventional root password and puts a simple approve/deny prompt for the same. This is not as secure as the password but it is definitely convenient on a mobile device.

WARNING: Rooting has potential risks of bricking the phone which means it could leave your phone non-functional. So before rooting your phone do your homework.

Benefits of Android Rooting

There are many benefits of rooting and few of them are discussed below:
1. Full Control
Android Rooting gives you the power to edit anything in the Android OS. After rooting you can do following things:

• Use themes
• Alter system files
• Change boot images
• Remove bloatware

To do this just use Titanium backup and delete apps from there. Although there are other methods also available on the web but we prefer using Titanium backup for this purpose.
2. Backup and Restore
Most of the rooted phones have this facility of taking back up of entire system to an SD card. In fact this is a very convenient feature. Say, if you try a new ROM, as you take back up of your phone, wipe it & flash the new ROM and if you don’t like it, simply restore from your backup to get all the same old features back.
One can use ROM Manager, the easiest tool to do this; developed by Koush (famous Android developer). With the ROM Manager you can easily flash a custom recovery image which will be required in order to take backup of your phone and will be used while restoring it.
Recovery image is a unique program which can be booted into outside device’s OS juts like an OS recovery console used in PC. BY default recovery image gives only provide a few options that too mainly related to wiping the phone. Whereas, in comparison to default recovery image; custom recovery image offers a wide variety of options for the same job. It includes scripts that can help in doing things like backup and restore system, fix file permissions, allow you to flash and install custom ROMs.
Normally some command line work is required on PC or on the terminal emulator on phone to flash a custom recovery image but with Koush’s ROM Manager this won’t be required as it should automatically flash a custom recovery image known as ClockworkMod Recovery. The only catch is that it supported only on some of the supported phones which is by the way a long list . You can find your phone’s name in this supported phone’s list which is constantly updated by Koush himself.

How To Use ROM Manager?

Its pretty simple to use ROM manager. You just need to download and install the application from Google Play store. Start the application and you will be prompted to allow the application superuser permissions which you have to make sure that you approve it. The very first thing which will be required is flash the ClockworkMod recovery image which we mentioned earlier. It can be done with the help of first option from the app. ROM Manager will then automatically find the latest version of the right custom image for your Android handset, download and install it. Once this is done, you can take backup or restore from an existing backup by using these two options – ‘Manage and Restore Backups’ & ‘Backup current ROM’.

3. Increase Memory Space on Your Phone
Even though Google did introduce Apps2SD officially in Android 2.2 Froyo update still it is up to developers to manually add support for this feature in their apps. Because of this reason it is fairly possible to overflow your device internal memory space.
The easiest way to overcome this problem is to enable most applications to be transferable or movable to SD card. For example, CyanogenMod one of the most popular custom ROM for Android allows its users to force most of the apps to SD even if developers didn’t add this feature. It doesn’t work on all the apps, especially if we talk about keyboard apps and other apps with widgets.
4. Run Applications Meant for Rooted Phones
Yes, it’s true that there are apps with some uniquely enhanced features that can be used on rooted phones only. Few of them are Titanium Backup, ROM Manager, Quick boot, Move2SD Enabler and many more such apps can be used on rooted devices.
5. Remove Bloatware
If your phone is rooted then you can also remove bloatware. Bloatware are nothing but pre-installed apps which comes from  manufacturer or carrier of the device. Most of these pre-installed apps are not useful and if they are removed then it can hellp you in saving some memory.
6. Use Custom ROMs
Well we have already covered, what custom ROMs are. Through the years, Android ROM community has grown greatly and ROMs have been developed for almost all the phones out there in the market. These days custom ROMs are coming major tweaks that can give you an entirely new look, feel and performance. The ROMs can make your Android phone fly by replacing the kernel with highly optimized versions or they can even over-clock the CPU.
Here at Android Trickz, we are developing a series of custom ROM reviews for various phones. So stay tuned for updates.

(Satyesh Kumar Singh)