Benefits of rooting your Android phone or tablet

The benefits of rooting Android devices are significant, but it’s a world not many dare venture into. We won’t blame you if you are wary of doing this. It’s intimidating when manufacturers keep telling you tinkering with a phone can void your warranty or harm your device. And it’s true — you may be left on your own if you decide to play with your phone’s stock software and something goes wrong.

With that said, we can also tell you there are plenty of reasons why rooting may be the best thing you can do to enhance your smartphone experience. Are you thinking of taking the road less traveled but need a little push? Below we talk about some of the critical benefits of rooting.

Reasons to root your Android phone

Disclaimer: Make sure you do your research well and be careful if you decide to unlock your phone’s full potential by rooting. As mentioned above, these procedures can void your warranty or brick your handset. No one but you will be responsible should it come to that. 

Read: Beginner’s guide to rooting | Rooting your phone? A few things to think about

Get rid of pesky bloatware

Here’s a significant benefit that comes with rooting: you can get rid of bloatware!

Having the ability to access administrator privileges over Android grants complete control over the applications installed. You no longer have to suffer from the cluttered app drawers and reduced memory space taken up by pre-installed carrier and manufacturer applications. Now you can instantly cut the bloatware and keep only the apps you really want.

Sure, you can disable apps in the settings, making sure they don’t show up in the app drawer. There’s also the option of hiding apps, depending on your UI or launcher. But in this case, they’re still there, eating up your memory space. Rooting is the only way to remove unwanted apps permanently, but please don’t uninstall something crucial, or your handset may stop working correctly. Apps like Titanium Backup are particularly helpful for organizing and culling this bloatware.

Alternative: How to disable Android bloatware without root

Real backups

This brings us nicely to the next major benefit of rooting Android, which is improved backup and restoring options. Yes, the cloud can back up some of your settings and app downloads, but that is not a proper backup; it’s just a list of things for the phone to download and change.

As already mentioned, Titanium Backup is one of the most popular backup apps used by rooters. It is essential if you’re going to start tinkering around with Android software. But as well as acting as a safety net in case you uninstall something important, Titanium Backup can also be used to backup your user data… any and all user data.

Related: How to back up your Android phone

You don’t wait around for manufacturers and carriers for updates

Once you’re fully backed up, you’re ready to move up to one of the other significant benefits of rooting — installing different versions of Android.

We all know manufacturers are often slow at delivering the latest Android updates, even to their flagship handsets, let alone aging ones. Some are getting better at it, but this is still an ongoing issue for many users. If you’re not a Pixel device owner, rooting opens the door to much faster Android updates, thanks to the developers who put time into porting the latest updates to various handsets.

Pretty much every semi-popular phone has a decent following of developers working on porting the latest versions of Android to their handsets, most of which can be found over at the XDA Forums. The only sacrifice is that you won’t receive official manufacturer versions of Android, so you might not enjoy all the features your phone came with. But if you were really worried about that, you probably wouldn’t be rooting in the first place.

Related: Everything there is to know about Android 12

We can’t forget those custom ROMs

If stock Android isn’t your thing, there are also tons of other customized ROMs offering unique features and improvements to the default Android experience.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the biggest names like Lineage OS, Paranoid Android, and OmniROM, to name a few. Many custom ROMs are actually at the forefront of innovation on Android, offering several features that aren’t available anywhere else.

Check this out: 10 features from other ROMs, skins, and platforms we’d like to see in stock Android

But as well as these big third-party developers, you’ll also find a lot of smaller developers tweaking away at the core Android experience, offering ROMs with vastly superior battery life or overclocked processor speeds. Not to mention that most custom ROMs are updated to the latest version of Android very quickly, too, bringing you the best of both worlds.

Overclocking and underclocking

Remember when all phones were slow? Well, not all, but they all needed that extra push. A trendy thing to do among root users was overclocking the processor to make things more snappy. Even mid-end smartphones are pretty fast now, so there isn’t much of a need for that anymore, but some of you may still want to speed things up.

Even if overclocking is no longer as popular, you will find that altering processor speeds is convenient. Got a super powerful phone and want to save battery? Under-clocking is also an option. Sometimes we don’t need all the power our specs offer, and we could use saving resources. That makes this one of the most unsung benefits of rooting.

Learn more: Google Tensor vs. Snapdragon 888

Save battery life

No one likes it when their smartphone is running out of its battery charge. While we have seen advancements in terms of battery charging speeds, the truth is that lots of apps drain your battery. This is the case even when the app is not in use. It’s also true that batteries lose life in phones over time.

Having a rooted phone allows users to download apps that can actually save battery life. One of our favorites is Greenify, which can discover which apps on your phone are draining your battery charge while not in use. The app puts them info full hibernation mode, so your phone battery can last much longer than usual.

More: Things you can do to improve your battery life

Apps that do more

As rooting opens up administrator type privileges on your handset, you’ll instantly have access to all the core files on your handset. File browser apps can take full advantage of this, allowing you to move stuff around on your internal memory if so required.

App-wise, we’ve already touched on Titanium Backup, but far more apps can make use of root permissions. Fans of custom ROMs can even use a ROM manager to install and update their operating system without the need to flash zip files from Recovery.

There are a lot of other great apps that only work on rooted devices. We won’t list them all here, but you can check out the 15 best ones in our dedicated post linked right below.

Here: The best root applications you can download

Dress to impress

The last reason for rooting your handset is the broader range of customization and theming options. After all, who doesn’t want their home screens looking snazzy?

Although there are options to tweak themes that don’t require rooting, usually through third-party launchers such as Apex and Nova, rooting gives you access to the important files needed to make changes in folders usually hidden from users. Access to the /system/fonts folder allows users to install and replace custom fonts. You can also flash zip files from Recovery to install themes too. But if all that folder browsing isn’t for you, there are also some great root-only theme applications to choose from.

Not convinced about having a rooted Android phone? There are ways to reverse your handset to stock software. Just check out our guide on how to unroot your Android phone.