Back in the day - rooting Android phones and installing custom ROMs were such a big part of Android. I remember so well using titanium backup and Greenify and Cyanogenmod and the list goes on.
Is it still necessary to root in 2023 though?
I have been on vanilla Android without root access for the past couple of years and at this point most root features have made it into the vanilla Android OS. What are your thoughts?
I’ve been a flashaholic since the CWM days, but I haven’t rooted since probably 2017 or so. Back in the day, rooting was practically necessary for a good UX, but Android’s matured enough now that I haven’t had the need for a few years.
Ah, good old clockwork mod. Back when installing a custom rom was simple. Unlock boot loader, flash custom recovery, use recovery to install rom and wipe, done! None of this a/b partition and “you have to be on this specific version of stock rom to Flash this” crap. Those were the days.
Same. I still try to buy phones with ROM support in case something goes sideways, but I haven’t used a custom ROM on my daily phone since 2016 or 2017 — and if I were to flash a custom ROM today, I still likely wouldn’t root it. Things typically work well enough that jumping through hoops to un-break SafetyNet for banking and mobile payments and even some games is too much trouble.
For what it’s worth, fixing safetynet is like a module or two and a couple reboots.