When you buy something you should have the right to repair it and modify it.
Currently, everything is basically a renters agreement, where you pay for something you have zero rights to modify or opt out of.
Few problems:
- Safteynet (play integrity) and root detection
There are magisk tweaks to help combat this but its a annoying game of cat and mouse. Some apps like chase have particularly annoying root detection to deal with. Also regaring safteynet once google fully enforces hardware attestation passing safteynet with tweaks will be borderline impossible (most tweaks try to spoof older phones that don’t support safteynet hardware attestation).
- Widevine
Many streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc) will downgrade your video quality to 480p-540p due to L3 from unlocking the bootloader (a step thats usually required before you can root).
- Physical security (potential risk)
Unlocking the bootloader is the first step to allowing for rooting and custom roms. One pro/con is when you unlock the bootloader you are partially at risk to a evil maid attack (some one with physical acess to your phone can compromise it). While difficult to do automatically (and probably very very rare) some one could hypothetically place a malicious bootloader that could steel data. The risk of this is mostly low but does exist.
once google fully enforces hardware attestation passing safteynet with tweaks will be borderline impossible
Never gonna happen. Full hardware attestation would give Google all the cards and too much power over manufacturers. Samsung is the largest Android manufacturer and they’re making people jump though hoops to unlock bootloader precisely because they don’t want to end up with full attestation.
Samsung and Google have been locked into a power struggle for many years now and they’re both careful about keeping the armistice. Samsung maintains a set of apps that mimic Google’s, ready to go in case Google ever pulls a Huawei and kicks them off Play.
- This could be fixed if phones could let us relock the bootloader, but with our own keys.
Then only possible way to unlock it again or change anything would be to at least factory reset and we’ll see something is wrong.
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I have yet to see a problematic app that deny list can’t handle
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Stremio /s to be fair I have never bothered about this in my phone, as I have a Nvidia Shield TV, and honestly any current setup box (official) would do the job, there are perks of using a movie of course… But I can use Netflix here only that I have never bothered to check out the quality, I wouldn’t be surprised if a module for this existed to be honest.
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I bet most people are interested in scamming those dudes that compulsively tap in game ads to fetch their crypto BS apps or whatever, it is a similar scenario of why hackers target Windows and not Linux users… Granted every device is at risk once it connects to the Internet.
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Strange that the focus point of this article is rooting, you can modify your device to install custom firmware etc without needing root exploits anymore!
Depends on the phone, many come with locked bootloaders
Many can be easily unlocked
But few can be relocked.
IMHO Android is not very free without root… I roll my eyes every time I see the need of adb commands when it is just way easier to slap in Magisk and have full control.
I come from iOS and I used to jailbreak the heck out of my devices, rooting is very similar to JB (but better).
Depends what you want to do, really. I’ve got a proper PC for serious tinkering, my phone has all my private data on so I’d rather have the security that comes with blocking root access.
I mean, literally replacing your device’s firmware sounds like a step above rooting, even if it’s arguably easier to do.
Exactly, so why is rooting even mentioned?
I’ve owned an android phone for over 10 years and have rooted most of them. To be honest, in that time I’ve rarely come across something that I’ve wanted to do but been unable to do without rooting. Generally anything I want to do also isn’t possible through rooting either. Same with custom ROMs, recently it seems you end up losing features rather than gaining them.
I would trade every half-assed Google feature update for a hosts based adblock capability.
That’s the sole reason that I root every device that I own.
And NO. A PiHole is not, repeat NOT a silver bullet. Nor is a local VPN with custom DNS.
On a rooted phone you can fully control app permissions and feed them fake data for the denied permissions.
You can’t do that without root. On a locked iphone you control only a tiny fraction of permissions and it will let the app know so it can refuse working.
Agreed and sometimes the amount of work trying to find some random radio file to flash because 5G stops working… it’s not worth the headache anynore
I used to root all my phones a decade ago. Now I just don’t see a point to it.
Same. I still do custom roms when my device runs out of support, but no longer because it’s cool to have a custom Rom. There’s hardly one that I find exciting nowadays.
security??
…doesn’t have anything to do with warranty violation
You can do things to improve security with root access. Better yet, with boot loader access you can make your phone much much more secure with graphene os
I don’t know if flashing a random ROM from xda because there’s no official builds available for my phone is considered a security improvement
lol, that’s true.
Stock support for my device is A12 🤡
And A14 is on its way!
