Many features that once required root have been added to Android over the years. However, many advanced tricks still require rooting your Android smartphone or tablet.
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to root —
rooting reduces your device’s security. That’s part of why
CyanogenMod’s founder is looking at adding additional features to Cyanogenmod that would eliminate the need for root.
Back Up and Restore App Data
The
popular Titanium Backup app,
which allows you to back up an app’s data and then restore it later,
requires root access. Android apps aren’t supposed to be able to read
other apps’ data — that’s a security vulnerability — so this still
requires root access. Much Android data is automatically backed up, but
Titanium Backup allows users to back up everything and easily restore
it, even data that wouldn’t normally be backed up.
Android includes some built-in backup features,
but they’re hidden — you have to access them by plugging your device
into a computer and running a special command. While the built-in backup
features are so hidden and not all app data is backed up to the cloud,
Titanium Backup is still very useful.
Change Your DNS Server
Want to
change your Android phone’s DNS server and
use a third-party DNS server
like Google Public DNS for possibly improved speed, OpenDNS for web
filtering, or Tunlr for easy access to geoblocked online media services?
Android
doesn’t make this easy. You can change the DNS server for each
individual Wi-Fi network you connect to, but you can’t set a preferred
DNS server system-wide. This requires a third-party app like SetDNS.
Sure, you could just change the DNS server on your router and you’d be
okay when you were at home, but this wouldn’t help you when you were out
and about. Android make this possible without rooting, but it’s
extremely tedious.
Remove Bloatware Completely
Android now provides a way to
disable apps that were preinstalled by the carrier or device’s manufacturer.
However, they’ll just be disabled — so they’ll still take up space on
the device’s storage. With root access, you can delete the applications
from the system partition, recovering the wasted storage and gaining the
ability to use it for other things.
This isn’t necessarily recommended, as it can cause problems if you remove apps that the device needs. That’s why disabling
bloatware apps
is generally a better idea — but that’s little comfort if you don’t
have much storage space left and you want to recover space wasted by
bloatware.
Gain Low-Level Hardware Access
After
rooting your device, you can install a custom Linux kernel on it. This
enables you to access features that require kernel-level changes. For
example, Nexus 4 users can install the Touch Control app to wake their
smartphones with a simple swipe on the display rather than a press often
power button. This is implemented as a kernel module because it
requires that low-level access.
Other commonly used features that
often require custom kernels include display calibration, CPU
downclocking (for more battery life), and CPU overclocking (for more
performance.)
Manage App Permissions
When you install an
app, Android shows you the permissions the app requires. This is a
take-it-or-leave-it offer — if you want to install a game but that game
requires an obscene level of permissions, you can’t just deny individual
permissions.
Root access allows you more control over app
permissions on your phone, as this feature isn’t available to typical
users. The good news is that Android 4.3 includes a hidden permissions
manager named “App ops.” This feature likely isn’t stable and shouldn’t
be relied on yet, but it’s hopefully a sign of things to come — with any
luck, we’ll see a stable permission manager introduced in Android 4.4.
Mount USB Sticks
It’s possible to
connect a USB stick to your Android tablet
using a standard USB OTG cable. However, Android doesn’t support USB
sticks natively. If you’d like to connect a USB stick to your tablet so
you can watch videos without wasting all your tablet’s storage, you’ll
need root access and something like the StickMount app. This utility
makes files on USB sticks available on the Android device’s file system
so other apps can access them, but it requires low-level access
available only to root users.
Get Full File System Access
Root
gives you full access to the system by definition, so it’s no
coincidence that people who want full read/write access to the entire
file system will require root. Root allows you to use file managers that
can access the entire file system and even edit Android’s configuration
files by hand in text editors — something hardcore Android tweakers may
find useful.
Automate More Things
We’ve previously covered
Tasker, an advanced application that lets you automate your Android device.
Tasker allows you to make things automatically happen when certain
conditions are met. However, some features you can change yourself
require root access when controlled by an application. If you want to
enable or disable airplane mode, connect or disconnect VPNs, or do other
advanced things that Android doesn’t allow apps to do, you’ll need to
give Tasker root access.
Stream To Apple AirPlay Devices
The
AirAudio app
makes Android devices AirPlay-compatible, allowing you to stream audio
from your device to an AirPlay-enabled receiver like an Apple TV.
AirAudio does this by capturing the audio data coming from an
application and sending it over the network. Android doesn’t normally
allow apps to listen to other app’s audio signals, so AirAudio requires
root access to do its thing.
This is an example of the sort of
unforeseen app that’s only possible because root allows the app to break
out of Android’s security model.
Adblock
We’re obviously
an ad-supported website, so we generally don’t jump up and down telling
everyone how to disable ads. However, it’s impossible to deny — one big
reason many people root their devices is to block ads at the system
level.
Many Android apps are free specifically because they
contain ads, so using a trick to disable advertisements in the app when
you could just spend $0.99 for the full, ad-free app isn’t very nice to
developers. Don’t expect Google to make this feature stop requiring root
anytime soon.
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it gives you an idea of some of the most common reasons for rooting.
Wi-Fi tethering
doesn’t necessarily require rooting anymore, either — even if the
carrier has disabled the built-in tethering features, most devices can
use Wi-Fi tethering via the
FoxFi app.
