#Android AndroidRoot Rooting OS

[andriodroot]

Android Root. What is Rooting and What encourages people to root their android devices.

Rooting has been a topic of controversy from a long time dating back to the 2009s and dates back to the birth of Unix OSs. Rooting your android allows greater access to a device's operating system, simply giving administrative rights to it, allowing a higher level of customization.

Let me elaborate on 'simply giving administrative rights' by comparing it to a real life situation. Let's say you rent a house. Do you own the house? NO, you do not. You are only allowed to live in it for the time you'll be living in it. Can you customize to the house? No you can't because obviously, you don't own it. DUH. Sure you can make simple adjustments such as furnishing or renewing kitchenware etc. But can you make modifications to the house? That's right! You CANNOT! Can you tear down the walls and make a brand new house with a new structure? Yes. YOU CAN'T. To do that, you need actual ownership rights to the house you have rented. Rooting is just like that. You get a smartphone. Do you own it? to a certain extent, yes. You obviously bought it for yourself. For example, such as installing applications in it. That's it. Can you change factory settings or customize its built in features/ settings? No, you cannot. Because you simply don't have the privileges to access such high admin administrative rights of its OS. Your smartphone's brand is the main man that owns those administrative rights.

So where does “Rooting” comes into the show?

With rooting, you can gain the above mentioned 'administrative rights' of your smartphone. Ain't that neat? Feels like a little bit on the malicious side? Do not worry as rooting isn't actually categorized as malicious. well YET. It is only in the 'privilege escalation threat' category. So for those who like to indulge themselves in a little guilty pleasure go ahead by all means. But keep in mind, as much as you now literally OWNS your phone, you will be responsible for any root failures or problems like accidentally bricking your phone.

Now let's get into what this ROOT actually is. 

It is a file directory/ folder in Linux based Operating Systems for the device to properly run, especially to boot your device. Typically users do not have any authority to access this directory for obvious "security" reasons. Ringing a bell that it sounds like something similar? Yeah, that windows/system32 is looking at you with a stink eye. It's looking at you scandalous gamers. Okay back to business. So these Linux OSs provide system administrators/ root users to access the root folder. This user is otherwise known as the “super user” or the “switch user” and abbreviated as su in any system partition of a rooted device. So basically this su has set-uid flag set and it always run as UID 0. 

So what encourages people to actually root their android devices? 

Some of the things that persuade people to do this are to get rid of bloatware; to perform full system backups as unrooted devices only allow backup of user land data; updating the OS before OEMs release new features and release new security patches and to simply install apps that hack games to allow free gameplay.