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Rooting Android Phones Essay

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Rooting Android Phones

Smartphones have become more and more common compared to a decade ago. Google's Android operating system is riding a wave of popularity that has rapidly eclipsed Apple's iOS. However, despite the relative openness and flexibility of the OS, your Android phone still isn't as powerful and customizable as it could be. To unlock all of your phone's potential, you'll need to root it.

The words “root”, “rooting”, “jailbreaking”, “root access”, and “unlocking” are terms that are used as the same thing. Rooting pertains generally to Android devices, such as Samsung Galaxy, Motorola Droids devices, etc.), while jailbreaking pertains to iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.). Android rooting is

the process in which the …show more content…

(Phelps, “To Root or Not to Root”).

Most Android devices come with hardware that is fairly heavily capable, yet the OS limits them and becomes the bottleneck. By rooting, you actually remove the bottleneck and hence can take full advantage of your beloved Android. For example, the OS does not allow overclocking a device’s CPU natively, and hence overclocking can only be done with a rooted phone. Root users can overclock the phone's CPU to give it a performance boost by telling the device’s processor to run at a speed slightly higher than it was set to run at. Or suppose you want to use your phone’s LED as flashlight but cannot because the phone manufacturer and/or the carrier provider don’t support the feature, rooting will allow you to bypass this limitation. Furthermore, rooted users can free up their phone’s memory. By default, app is installed and stored on the phone's memory. "Rooting" allows you to move installed applications to your memory card (microSD, SD), thus freeing up system memory for additional files or apps.

Another popular thing to do is to change the look and feel of the device by changing the theme or custom user interface (UI). Custom UI’s are skins that the manufacturer’s put on top of Android in order to differentiate their devices from other Android devices. Some people might not like the custom UI that the manufacturer put, or they prefer other company’s UI. For these reasons, Android developers have made a ROM (read only memory)

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