Human beings constantly search for ways to improve on what life has to offer them. That includes what smartphone makers have to offer them too. Right from the early days of smart phones, people have sought for ways to bypass the constraints set on the user by the makers of the phone and the operating system. Whether it jailbreaking your iPhone or rooting your Android device, transcending the limitations imposed by the phone maker is becoming more of a norm these days.
Ever since users found a way of switching user to get access to the root of Android’s Linux subsystem, an entire industry has sprung up to deliver an almost limitless range of features and modifications. In spite of the fact that rooting voids your warranty and the ongoing efforts of carriers to block access to rooted devices, rooting seems to be here to stay. Here are ten compelling reasons why you should root your Android phone.
1. Choose your flavor
One of the aspects of the current Android market is the multiplicity of versions that are actively being pursued by developers and manufacturers. As a result, you may be limited in terms of what you can do with the particular flavor of Android that ships with your phone. Rooting allows you to overwrite the stock ROM with a custom ROM of your choice, thereby giving you access to all that you want to do with your phone.
2. Use the power of your phone OS
The Android phones of today are actually pretty powerful machines in terms of hardware, but your operating system does not always let you take full advantage of the power available. Once you root your Android, you can gain full access to your hardware and let it respond to the software in ways that your firmware will not let you do.
3. Run apps from portable storage
Android devices allow you to run apps that are installed on the internal memory of the phone. This limits you in terms of the amount of internal memory available for you to install and run apps from. On phones with root access, you can install mods that let you run apps from your SD cards. While this may be marginally slower in response time, it does let you run a much larger selection of apps than if you had to run them off your internal memory only.
4. Use features that your firmware doesn’t have
One of the beautiful things about open source is that everything can be used by everyone. However, with Androids, much of the features put out by one maker is not available to others. Similarly, features tend to be dropped by makers as versions and flavors evolve. You might be missing some skin or feature from another maker or an earlier version of the firmware. With a rooted device, you can run just what you want.
5. Overclock your CPU
Rooting your phone lets you use applications that unlock the full power of your processor. This lets you boost your software performance significantly. Apps like SetCPU let you overclock your processor and improve performance dramatically.
6. Use advanced multitouch features
Multitouch features are supported on most Android devices but for some reason they have not been included by many Android phone manufacturers. In some cases, they have been introduced and then discontinued in subsequent models. With a rooted Android, you can get back the full multitouch functionality.
7. Web access for your local systems
Though carriers are on the warpath to prevent this, the geeks and hackers are usually one step ahead of them as far as tethering is concerned. You can use your rooted Android to share your connection with your laptop of your PC through WiFi or Bluetooth.
8. Access to better keyboards
Most of the intelligent keyboards with predictive text on Android phones are an eternal source of frustration and, of course, predictive text bloopers. While some developers have come out with good keyboard interfaces and software, most often they cannot be ported to other platforms. With a rooted device, you can get your hands and fingers on to a better user interface and not be limited to the one you got sold with your firmware.
9. Back up your OS
System backup and restore features are not among the better known aspects of most Android phones. With a rooted phone you can back your entire OS image and kernel on to a storage device or an SD card. This frees you up to experiment with roll-backs and mods without having to worry about how to recover your phone data in the event of a crash, or worse still, being bricked.
10. Doing justice to your device
Your Android device is capable of doing a whole lot of things. Allowing yourself to be limited to what your firmware lets you do is injustice to the power of the device. The huge rooting and modding community that exists out there has only one objective, to free the device from restrictions. And that is possible only if more and more people root their Android phones.