Android prides itself for being an open platform. On a technical and legal level, that might be true. But when it comes to the day to day use of smartphones, Android doesn’t stray too far from iOS’ walled garden. Although not completely locked down, users are still locked out of functionality and hardware that may be rightfully theirs. There exists a class of Android users that constantly work to subvert this status quo. Some might see them as revolutionaries. Others look at them like they’re insane. They are the root users, and they are on the verge of becoming an endangered specie.
What the fork is root?
The term “rooting” traces its roots, pardon the pun, to Android’s Linux legacy. Root is the Linux operating system’s unchanging name for the super user, the administrator, the one and only user that has god-like powers over each and every part of the OS. Whatever security limits frameworks like SELinux impose can be bypassed, modified, or undone by root.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
That immediately poses a problem for a smartphone platform. For desktop-oriented systems like Linux, Windows, and, yes, even the BSD-based macOS, having an easily accessible super user is no problem. But when you have a device that is almost always connected to the Internet and has a higher chance of falling into the wrong hands than your hulking desktop, it becomes a security risk.
Google has bent over backwards to hide something that comes naturally to Linux-based systems: root access. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t sit well with not a small number of Android users who expected Google to deliver a smartphone platform that didn’t suffer from the chokehold that Apple had on iOS. A platform that embraced all, including power users.
Valid reasons
Admittedly, in the early days of Android, rooting was almost necessary to milk Android for all it’s worth. Android a few years back pales in comparison to the Android you have in your pockets today. Functionality was very limited and so was customization. The rooting and modding community had to come up with all sorts of hacks in order to implement a much needed feature, fix something that broke, sometimes intentionally, in a new release, or simply fine tune the performance of a device. All of those required root access.
But as mentioned, Android today is very different and many of the reasons that gave birth to the rooting community have vanished or, at the very least, been mitigated. Workaround and hacks still do exist, but many of them no longer require rooting a device. Users and Android developers still don’t see eye to eye on some things, but it is easier to install some third party app these days than risk voiding warranties by rooting.
That’s not to say that there is zero reasons to root a device anymore. There are still things that no app, even with all the permissions, can do. And there are some use cases where rooting is really required. Removing some bloatware, mucking around with other operating systems, running servers like VNC, and more. But the power that comes with being able to do those and more comes at a rather high price, and one that entire Android community has to pay.
Security toll
Rooting as it exists on Android is practically a security exploit. On a normal UNIX-based system like Linux and BSD, getting root access is as easy as logging into the user (named root) and entering the root password. In contrast, Android implements restrictions on multiple levels of the operating system so as to block root access. And the only way to get around that is to technically hack into Android’s security.
This is one area where Android is not so different from a proprietary OS like iOS, though on that side of the fence they call it “jailbreaking” instead. In a nutshell, rooting involves finding system vulnerabilities that will allow an arbitrary and unauthorized piece of code to run. This piece of code will usually then tweak system settings, like mounting partitions with read/write access