Rooting a android phone

I have my first android run phone, I can say its taken some time to figure it out. I have found also that you can root them kinda like exploiting the wii, run a custom rom on the phone to do stuff to it that the factory has locked or limitations on. Like make the cpu faster, increases battery life, get paid apps fore free from a different market, increase volume output. Does anybody know about this and how hard is it to do? If I hacked my wii can I root a android phone or should leave it up to somebody that knows what they are doing, since it did say you can brick the phone and make unuseable.

What are the real benefits to rooting ? I did google it but kinda hard to understand what they are talking about and most just talked about how to root.

Getting paid apps for free is against the law in pretty much whatever country you live in.
BTW, I have an Orange San Francisco, rooted with universal androot.

Quote
metroid_maniac
Getting paid apps for free is against the law in pretty much whatever country you live in.
BTW, I have an Orange San Francisco, rooted with universal androot.

So pretty much I shouldn't root and just pay for the apps I want then. Last thing I need is to get into trouble getting a app that only cost a couple bucks anyway. What is the real benefit to haveing it rooted then? That universal root I guess that would work with any phone? When you rooted what things did you notice was better?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2011 05:04AM by dirtrider73068.

When you have rooted our device you can use other apps such as
Titanium Backup, which allows you to perfectly backup all your application data, which makes it easy to switch to a new new phone
Adfree Android, which blocks adverts in all apps, including "lite" versions of apps
Droidwall, which allows you to select which apps can have Internet access.
Wireless Tether, which allows you to share your mobile internet, even if you don't have Android 2.2

And you can install custom roms. Say your manufacturer has decided to stop providing updates for your phone, leaving it on Android 2.1. You can install a custom rom for Android 2.3, and get all the new features. What's more, this removes all the annoying branding on your phone.

A lot of Root apps can be found directly on the Android Market, but they still need root to work.

What phone do you have?

I have the motorola comet or otherwise the huwaei ideosu8150 I think it was, tmobile rebranded as a comet. I haven't found much on rooting it.

Hmm. Well, rooting it should be fine with Universal Androot but I don't know about Custom ROMs.

I have seen a vid of a guy useihttp://speedtest.co/videos-rooting-the-android-comet-%5BUzGKiJnaTW8%5D.cfmng the z4root and how he did it, I think thats the universal root read it it was a one click root.

Oh yes, it's very easy to root an android device. It goes like:
Install Universal Androot
Open it
Tap the root button
Uninstall Universal Androot.
That easy.

Well I need to dig deeper then if its that easy then I could do that myself from the sounds of, I mean if I hacked my wii and got it working pretty good, I am sure I can handle this.

[wiki.cyanogenmod.com]

That might help you.

note that rooting doesnt allow custom roms, you need to unlock the bootloader for that. not sure if that tool will do this or not.

I don't think Universal Androot unlocks the bootloader.

GingerBreak ( [forum.xda-developers.com] ) should easily root most phones on the latest version of Android.

me too had this doubt

Everything rooting allows you to do has been pretty well covered but I would like to take a minuete to try to break it down to a more noob friendly level.

First off root gives you full access to the phones system files that are other wise locked. This, as you know, allows you to add custom roms. Cyanagon Mod(CM7) was linked to above. This is w what I am running on my Droid 2 Global at the moment. It gave me gingerbread(Android 2.3) while the phone comes with Froyo(Android 2.2). Cyanagon used a clean untouched version of android as its base. Manufactures like Moto, in your case and mine, add Motoblur integrating it in to the very basic android source code.I personally liked Motoblur, but I can sync my contacts with Facebook anyways. It is not as fancy as Motoblur such as not displaying status updates when you click a contacts name, but it still syncs there profile pic which was the main thing i liked in motoblur anyways. Samsung adds TouchWiz UI to the android source code. HTC adds Sense UI to there phones. This more or less makes that manufactures phone a bit more unique then there competition. Since CM7 is based on vanilla android as it is usually referred to, it does not have a custom UI to hog up system resources. The devs take vanilla android and start molding and hacking at it optimizing, tweaking and adding features.

Now that is more about ROMs then rooting, but rooting will allow you to install a "recovery" software that then lets you flash roms, but also it allows you to make a mirror image back up of your phone to restore if you mess something up.

Root allows you to use special apps Titanium Backup(TB), as mentioned above, which backs up all user apps and data. It can back up system data/apps to. Now starting with Froyo, Android syncs this data with the market, and will allow you to auto restore your apps from the market if you ever do a factory reset for example. However, this process will always take longer then TB because you have to download and install the app. With TB, you are simply pulling the files from your phone. Plus it restores the apps one by one where as the market does it many at a time and can slow the phone down since it will be downloading and installing multiple apps at once. TB could lag the phone to but again, its faster.

You can use Ad blocker apps, but I generally prefer not to. Typically the in app ads are not in the way causing no problems. I try to support the devs when possible.

You mentioned other markets. Well there are several. Some legit, and some are warez. None of these actually require root access to use.I will not name any warez markets for obvious reasons, but there is, for example, the SAM(Slide Me Android Market) which is a free app and the apps and games it provides do not have to adhere to any of googles policies. This does not mean they are offensive,warez related, or anything else negative. For one reason or another they prefer to use a different market.

Rooting also makes it easier,although i think it can be done with out root but it requires knowledge of using command prompt to manually type in commands., to install inverted apps if they are system apps. For example a black and blue market:
[i986.photobucket.com]
Black and Red market:
[i986.photobucket.com]
Blacked out Google Voice:
[img840.imageshack.us]
And so forth. Again root is not always needed, but generally makes it easier if the app is a system app like the market.

Xplorer4x4 You gave really nice reviews and information.