Is it worth rooting an Android phone in 2025?
“Rooting”, when applied to an Android device, is the process of getting administrator-level access to the underlying operating system. In Unix terminology, ‘root’ is the conventional user ID for the system administrator. The term has another meaning which makes me reluctant to use it but, sadly, there isn’t really an alternative.
With root access, you can (in principle) make changes to the device that go beyond any the built-in, end user tools allow.
Back in the day, enthusiasts always rooted their Android phones. In fact, custom ROMs like Cyanogen were at one time pre-rooted; it was assumed that anybody who was willing to go to the hassle of installing a new operating system would automatically want it rooted.
Rooting today is, in general, no more difficult than it was ten years ago, with one exception: these days, you’re unlikely to be able to do it without erasing all the user data on the handset. That’s fair enough: I wouldn’t want somebody to steal my phone, and then be able to root it with all my data in place. So far as I know, the first step in rooting any modern Android device is to unlock the bootloader, and that invariably comes with a data wipe.
Typically, to root a handset you’ll install something that looks like an over-the-air update, but in fact adds some extra code to the boot partition that allows for root access. Or you might take the vendor’s original firmware, and modify one of its components to add this code. A popular tool for both these methods is Magisk.
These days, alternative Android firmwares are rarely pre-rooted (unless you’re using a debug version) and rooting them is no easier than rooting the vendor’s stock firmware. Most alternative firmwares do not actively encourage rooting; some, like Graphene OS, are actively hostile to the idea.
Why do we root less these days?
There are, I think, several reasons for this.
1. There is less need to root. Android has improved in many ways over the years. We don’t usually need to root it, just to fix problems, or make it work the way we want. There was a time when we would root a phone just to get different display colours or icons; this is rarely necessary these days, unless your requirements are very unconventional. We don’t need to root to block advertisements from web browsers, because modern web browsers usually provide their own support for this. In practice most, but not all, the reasons we had for rooting are less pressing than they once were.
2. Rooting breaks compatibility. Because rooting allows access to information that an app supplier might prefer the user (or another app) not see, app developers increasingly check for rooting. Proponents of rooting know this, and seek ways to hide the root status from apps; app developers know this too, and are constantly looking for new ways to defeat root-hiding methods. Google colludes with the app developers (or supports them, depending on your viewpoint), and provides APIs that developers can use to test whether a handset has been modified from stock. Banking and payment apps are notorious for being fussy in this way.
3. The appearance of respectability. The maintainers of custom firmwares are trying to distance themselves from the gung-ho hacking activity of former days. They want installing their software to be seen as a mainstream, respectable activity, rather than an act of rebellion. There is thus less help available to people who want to root.
4. Rooting introduces security concerns. Back in the days when Android enthusiasts rooted their phones as a matter of routine, I don’t think we really understood how much of a target smartphones would become. While rooting does have the potential to weaken security, it’s probably not a huge problem these days because…
5. Rooting is unrewarding. This, I think, is the biggest
reason why Android enthusiasts have become less willing to root. Back in
the day, once you had root access, you could hack on your phone’s files
to your heart’s content. These days, files are locked down in a way that
makes them hard to modify even with root access. The underlying
Linux filesystems are mounted read-only, or are ephemeral, copied from
some filesystem image at boot time. So, even if you can make changes,
they won’t survive a reboot. The days of blocking advertising servers by
giving them fake IP numbers in /etc/hosts are long gone,
for better or worse.
Magisk provides a solution, albeit an imperfect one, for problem (5). With Magisk, you can install files in a writeable part of the filesystem (where Android user data is stored) that gets copied to the main filesystem at boot time. These copies overwrite the stock files. You can also provide scripts that get run at boot time. These methods are far, far less convenient than simply hacking on files but, to be fair, they are easier to reverse if you make a catastrophic mistake.
Still, using root access to modify a phone’s behaviour is much more difficult and time-consuming than it once was. It also requires a higher level of expertise because, not only do you need to know what files to hack on, you need to understand the machinery (Magisk, for example) that will do the hacking. And testing your changes requires a reboot.
Why might we still root?
Given these disadvantages, why might we still root in 2025?
First, there remain a few circumstances in which only rooting can provide the low-level modification required to fix a problem. With rooting you can, for example, force the handset to enable voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) support in a region where it would not normally be available to your specific handset. You can, with the necessary expertise, tweak the CPU speed governor to squeeze out a little extra battery life or, alternatively, get a few more frames per second from a game. These are highly specialized modifications, that can potentially damage a handset, and need to be used with caution.
Second, if you need to remove vendor cruft and bloatware from a
handset, rooting gives you a bit more power. Many irritating and
resource-hogging apps can be disabled or effectively removed using
adb, but not all. Again, though, rooting gives you
enough rope to hang yourself; disabling the kinds of services that can’t
be managed using adb is something that needs to be done
very carefully.
Third, there are rooted backup apps. It’s virtually impossible to do a full backup of all user data on an unrooted Android phone. Even after all these years, Android does not have a reliable, local backup method. It’s not in Google’s interests to provide one, of course, because Google wants all your data on their servers. Most effective Android backup utilities only work on rooted handsets.
Finally, root access is helpful if you just like to get inside the handset and poke around, to understand how things work. So much of the system is otherwise invisible, that it’s difficult to learn much.
Closing remarks
In the past, my main reason for rooting was to remove vendor cruft and spyware. These days I run Lineage OS or Graphene on my handsets, neither of which have a lot of inessential software. Nevertheless, I still like to remove the little that I don’t need, even if it’s just to improve the battery life by 0.1%. I’m just obsessive that way.
If you’ve already carried out the steps needed to install something
like /e/OS or Lineage, rooting as a further step is a relatively trivial
one. So I generally do it as a matter of routine. I also root Samsung
handsets with vendor firmware, because it’s no longer practicable to run an
alternative firmware on them (because of the lack of VoLTE support).
Rooting still allows for more comprehensive de-bloating than
adb, although not overwhelmingly so.
I accept that rooting will create compatibility problems with commercial apps; this is a problem I solve by not using any. That may not be possible, or even desirable, for many of us.
