Rooting your Android phone
First of all, it is worth asking why you would want to root your Android phone at all. You need to be aware that you will be voiding your warranty by doing so (although it is possible, at least for some phones, to “unroot” them) and that if you are generally happy with the way you can use your phone, there is no need to root the phone “just because you can”.
That said, there are a few reasons why you may want to root the phone:
- you want to have more control over your phone’s settings
- you want to install software that requires root privileges
- you want to be able to take a full backup of your phone
- you want to install a custom ROM or a generic ROM instead of a branded one
So what does “rooting” actually do? The Android OS is built on Linux. By default, all Android applications run as a different, unprivileged user, so they can’t access each others’ data or generally influence each other in a bad way. Linux also knows a user called “root”, which is the system’s superuser (similar to the “Administrator” user in Windows). That user has access to all the data on the system. Certain changes to the system configuration, such as loading of kernel modules, changes to the CPU frequency or – yes – the flashing of ROMs are reserved for the root user. Android normally doesn’t give the phone’s owner the option to run software as root. For security reasons, that’s actually a good thing. However, if you want to do any of the things mentioned above, getting Android to grant you root access is the first step.
How to do it
Unfortunately there is no one tool that will work for all phones. Rooting tools depend on specific bugs in the phone’s software, which may be different on every device. So you may need to find the right tool for your phone. For example, the “Unrevoked” tool worked great for my HTC Desire. Here’s a list of tools you may want to try:
Once you’ve rooted your phone, it may be a good idea to install the ROMmanager app and flash a new recovery image that gives you access to more features from the system recovery mode. You can also use ROMmanager to install custom ROMs, take a backup of your current ROM and so on.
Whatever application you used to root your phone, it will have installed an additional app to control superuser privileges on your phone. Whenever an application now requires root privileges, a notification will pop up and you will be able to grant root access either once or permanently. Be careful that you only grant this access to applications you trust. If some application you didn’t know as a root application suddenly wants root access, something may be wrong and you it would be best if you refused that access to avoid exposing all your data to a potentially malicious app.
Update 21/03/11:
You can now find instructions how to root a HTC Thunderbolt, which none of the above tools support so far, on the AndroidPolice website.
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