Benefits of Rooting your Android device

Disclaimer: Just be sure you do your research well and be careful if you decide to unlock your phone’s full potential by rooting.

Get rid of Bloatwares

The first benefit of accessing administrator privileges over Android is full control over the applications installed on your handset. No longer do you have to suffer from the cluttered app drawers and reduced memory space taken up by pre-installed carrier and manufacturer applications, you can instantly cut the bloatware and keep only the apps that you really want.

Even if you’re up to date with Android 4.1 or above (by now you likely are), which grants users the ability to disable these pre-installed apps if you don’t want to see or use them, you can’t permanently remove them. They’re still there eating up your memory space. Rooting is the only way to permanently get rid of these pesky apps, but please don’t uninstall something crucial or your handset may stop working properly. Apps like Titanium Backup and Link2Sd are particularly helpful for organizing and culling this bloatware.

Nandroid Backups

Once rooted you can create complete backups of your entire handset using the ClockworkMod & TWRP Recovery option, providing you with extra protecting in case of a major malfunction. Recovery can only be accessed before booting into Android, but it provides additional backup options in case, for whatever reason, Android fails to boot properly or experiences a crippling error. This makes ClockworkMod & TWRP Recovery an essential tool for those looking to install custom versions of Android.

Custom Roms

We all know manufacturers are often pretty slow at delivering the latest Android offerings even to their flagship handsets, let alone aging devices. Some are getting better at it, but this is still an ongoing issue for many users. So if you’re not a Nexus device owner, rooting opens the door to much faster Android updates, thanks to the developers who put time into porting the latest updates to various handsets.

Pretty much every semi-popular handset has a decent following of developers working on porting the latest versions of Android to their handsets, most of which can be found over at the XDA Forums. The only sacrifice here is that you won’t receive official manufacturer versions of Android, so you might not enjoy all the features your phone came with, but if we were really too worried about that we probably wouldn’t be rooting in the first place.

Overclocking and underclocking

Remember when all phones were slow? Well, not all, but they all needed that extra push. A very popular thing to do among root users was overclocking the processor to make things more snappy. Even mid-end smartphones are pretty fast now, so there is not much of a need, but some of you may still want to speed things up.

But even if overclocking is no longer as popular, you will find that altering processor speeds is definitely convenient. Got a super powerful phone and want to save battery? Why not underclock the processor? Sometimes we don’t need all the power our specs have to offer, and we could really use saving resources.

Apps that do more

As rooting opens up administrator type privileges on your handset you’ll instantly have access to all the core files on your handset. File browser apps can take full advantage of this, allowing you to move stuff around on your internal memory if so require.

App wise, we’ve already touched on Titanium Backup, but there are far more apps that can make use of root permissions, and simply aren’t available with a non-rooted device. Fans of custom ROMs can even use a ROM manager to install and update their operating system without the need to flash zip files from Recovery.

Rooting is sometimes criticized for compromising handset security, but security apps, such as Cerberus and Avast, use root functions to bury themselves deep down into the operating system, making them hard for would be thieves to remove. These apps can also be granted permissions that aren’t available on unrooted devices, such as access to GPS data even when the device is locked.

There’s also additional gesture apps, data syncing software and even theme managers to customize the look of your handset.

Dress to impress

My final reason for rooting your handset is the wider range of customization and theming options, after all who doesn’t want their home screens looking snazzy.

Although there are options to tweak themes and whatnot that don’t require rooting, usually through third part launchers such as Apex and Nova, rooting gives you access to the important files needed to make changes in folders that are usually hidden from users. Access to the /system/fonts folder allows users to install and replace custom fonts. You can also flash zip files from Recovery to install themes too. But if all that folder browsing isn’t for you, there are also a some great root-only theme applications to choose from.

Wrapping up

As you can see there’s plenty of stuff to do with your rooted handset. If those aren’t enough reasons to root your handset, then I don’t know what is. Why do you root your device?

Source: AndroidAuthority

Leave a comment