Should I root my phone or not? This is a question Android geeks have in mind all the time. Rooting an Android smartphone unlocks a whole new world but it comes with its fair share of troubles. But are the troubles worth it? Well, we are here to answer that question. If you are looking for good enough reasons to convince you to root your smartphone, here are 12 reasons why you should go ahead and take the plunge.
1. Custom ROMs
Most people root their Android smartphones so they can easily go ahead and install their favorite custom ROMs on them. Custom ROMs offer a lot of advantages like giving users the hope to install and use the latest flavor of Android when the OEM isn’t rolling out an update. Along with that, custom ROMs bring to the table a variety of features & customization options. There are plenty of great custom Android ROMs available such as LineageOS, Paranoid Android, Resurrection Remix, and more — you can choose to your liking.
Once you have rooted your Android device, the doors to customization heaven are wide open and you can go ahead with changing each and every aspect of your experience. It may sound crazy but that’s one of the key purposes of rooting and thanks to systemless root tools like Magisk, you get access to a number of modules like Xposed and more. All these modules allow you to completely change the theme, boot animation, fonts, audio experience, and a lot more to suit your needs.
Moreover, you can make system-level changes and change almost everything including the navigation buttons, lockscreen, quick setting, notification shade, status bar, launcher and much more. There are several tweaks available for display, media, power saving, and hardware keys. Along with modules, there are also a ton of apps like GMD Gestures (download), Substratum theme engine (download), and Spectrum (download), among many others which let you personalize the OS to the hilt.
If you didn’t already know, the kernel is the core component of an Android device. The kernel serves as a communication medium between the hardware and software, enabling better system resource management. Each OEM bakes the device with their own default kernel, but you can’t control its working.However, when you root your device, it gives you the power to install a custom kernel like ElementalX (visit) or Franco Kernel (visit) and be able to adjust whatever you want. You can choose to overclock the Gold cores when you’re gaming or possibly rendering videos on your device, underclock them for improved battery life, or recalibrate the vibration motor to your own liking.
4. Boost Performance
Now that you know how to manage your kernel, well, you can use them to give your old rooted devices a performance boost. Android is regularly criticized for its inconsistent performance and while it’s in better shape now, there’s still scope for improvement. We would like to point out some of the apps, that when used along with custom kernels can provide day-to-day better performance.You can use an app like SetCPU to overclock your device’s CPU for a more snappy performance. Overclocking basically means increasing your processor’s frequency for better performance. While this does boost the performance of an Android device, battery woes are a part of it.
One of the best things about rooting your device is that you gain access to tons of new features to play with and I absolutely love this part. For instance, both Magisk Module and Xposed framework bring a myriad of modules that bring along features like multi-window, detailed app permissions, native clipboard, better audio performance, YouTube background playback, boot manager and a lot more.
If that isn’t enough for you, well, apps like IFTTT and Tasker also bring a lot of awesome features if your device has root access, essentially handing down the ability to automate anything on your smartphone with ease.
There’s no scarcity of apps for non-rooted devices. The Google Play Store is flooded with over 2.5 billion apps. But there are certain cool apps that can only be accessed by rooted users. Apart from the apps we have already mentioned, there are many more great apps for rooted Android users such as DriveDroid (download), Substratum (download), DiskDigger (download), Migrate (download) etc. which make the best use of root access to bring you some great functionality and control.
Android is fragmented and a lot of users can always be found complaining about the poor battery optimization on their devices. Well, if you are one of those users, you should root your device right away as there are apps & mods that totally refine your Android’s battery performance. Greenify (download) is arguably the best battery optimizer app for rooted devices, which brings cool features like auto-hibernation mode that hibernates the apps that are heavily consuming your battery.
System apps and bloat apps from device makers can cause a problem if your device does not have huge internal storage. Well, rooting brings along the ability to remove any system app or bloatware. There are various apps that remove bloatware, but we quite like 3C Toolbox (download) because of its advanced app managing features. The app enables you to remove system apps, but that’s not all, you can also remove updates to apps, move an app to the SD card along with other advanced options. If you are looking for something a bit simple to remove bloatware from your device, well, you can install NoBloat (download).
9. Backup Everything
While Android provides a backup feature to non-rooted users, it’s no match against the abilities of popular backup apps like Titanium Backup (download). There are various apps for rooted devices that let you take a complete backup of your device, but this is the best one out there. You can use the backup option available in TWRP to make a complete NANDroid backup, which includes all of your device’s data, quite easily without any additional tools.
With the craze of Google Camera, everyone wants to install the latest GCam on their smartphone. However, there is a bottleneck that stops users from using GCam and that’s the Camera2API support. On older devices especially which were launched with Nougat and Oreo, Camera2API is natively disabled and OEMs have still not shown any interest in enabling the API. In such a scenario, you do not have many options other than rooting your Android device. You can easily root your device and enable Camera2API through the Build Prop or by installing a Magisk Module. We have written an extensive guide on how to enable Camera2API so head over to the linked article and enjoy GCam on your Android device.
11. Access Pixel Features
As we all know, Pixel devices are the first in line to get the new features on Android. And it takes months– in some cases, more than a year– for Google to bring those features to all Android devices. For Android enthusiasts like us, that is simply unbearable. So if you want to taste the Pixel-exclusive features on your Android device right away then rooting comes to your help. Most of the Pixel features are not hardwired to the OS and it only needs a couple of changes in the Build Prop to access those features. You just need to rename your device to one of the latest Pixels and bam! There you have it. For instance, Google Assistant 2.0 is available on Pixel devices (as of now, only in the US), but it does not seem that it’s going to arrive on other Android devices anytime sooner. However, with root and Build Prop change, you can taste the Pixel goodies right now.
For me, this is one of the main reasons why I root my Android device. Say, there is an app that offers a sought-after feature — Google Feed on OnePlus launcher — in other countries except for your region. If you want that feature then you can’t install the particular APK from the compatible region because of the same package name. And since it’s a system app, you can’t uninstall the app either without root. But if you have the root privilege, you can simply override the system app with another app having the same package name. This way, you can enjoy the official app with new features and at the same time, having access to seamless updates. How awesome is that? So if you want new features, rooting is essential.
These should be good enough reasons to root your Android device, don’t you think? Come to think of it, a rooted Android device does have access to way more features and options than a non-rooted one. But rooting doesn’t come without shortcomings. So to get a full picture, you should know the disadvantages of rooting your Android too. Click on the link to read that article and then make an informed choice.
