Gadgetory

unlocking and routing there are two things that we hear quite a bit whenever we hear about Android and sometimes even when we hear about iOS but with iOS it's called jailbreaking they're not the same thing unlocking and routing but it's not too difficult to see why there's some confusion there I'm Joe Levi and today on the Android power user see if we can't clear up some of that confusion when we're talking about unlocking and rooting your device the unlocking part has to do with unlocking the bootloader there are some other things that you can unlock like sid and sim unlocking we're not talking about those this is your bootloader and we talked about the bootloader on the last episode of Android power user so if you don't remember that hit pause and hit this link so you can go back to it that having been said locking your bootloader well that's something that comes done right out of the box that's right your phone or your tablet chances are it's already locked as soon as you get it and you turn it on so locking a bootloader is a lot like locking your house to get in you have to have a key it's a really a good thing right because it keeps all the bad guys from just walking into your house and stealing all your stuff the analogy is pretty similar with a bootloader except with a bootloader unlike your house the manufacturer doesn't give you a key and you can't get into your house so pretty much the analogy breaks down at that point but it does keep the bad guys out and it keeps bad applications from doing things that you may not want them to do to your device when your bootloader is locked it means you can't go in and put on a custom recovery image you can't put on a custom ROM most of the time you can't even modify system files it's not all that fun and it doesn't let you do a lot of things that you want to do then again it doesn't let you do a lot of things that the OEMs and probably the carrier's too don't want you to do which is probably the leading force on why boot loaders come locked straight from the factory even when the majority of the OEMs have said we will provide a tool to let you unlock your bootloader they just didn't tell us when most of the time that's after the device has been out on the market for a while other times it's right away the device is released week or so later you can unlock it with Google devices you can unlock in the minute you get them Google's got a tool you just connect it to your computer and OAM unlock tada you're done so now that we've talked about unlocking let's talk about routing they usually go hand-in-hand and they usually go in that order though not necessarily always in that order routing is giving your device route level permissions usually immediately after you've done that you apply a package of tools that lets you use Super User permissions and super user tools root and super user though technically not the same type of permissions they're not exactly the same but we use those words pretty much interchangeably in the Android community even though they're technically not the same most of what we do is super user super user you get a whole bunch of tools that lets you do all kinds of things usually that comes along with the package called busybox once you do all kinds of low-level stuff that you normally wouldn't be able to do because those tools aren't included well because nobody needs those tools right except for Android power users and we do and we can depending on your device you may not need to unlock before you root in fact you might be able to do something called a soft root now a soft root is something that goes away when you turn off your device or specifically when you power it down not just when you put it into sleep but still it's something nice that you can have and get around and do what you need to do and then of course you lose it when you when you power down it and back up and it's a pain and it's annoying but oh well at least we're able to do it perma route is when you've got route all the time it's a good thing and it can be a bad thing because you see you've just essentially taken the locks off of your door and I know we're mixing the unlocking and the routing now but now any app that you install on the device has the possibility to use all of those root level permissions they can walk right into your house and do whatever they want steal your stuff steal more of your stuff sleep in your bed eat your cereal just dogs and cats living together total chaos hopefully they don't do that but they can and you've got to be kind of careful when you are applying root-level permissions but what you can do with it remember all those bloatware apps that you've had pre-loaded on your phone I'm not gonna mention any carrier names but one of them whose colors are bright red comes to mind I don't like them I want them gone and I can't do that unless I have root and then I can go ahead and clean them out real easy it's not difficult at all but because they are system apps I can't remove them until I have root okay so talking about system apps I can replace system apps let's say I've got a nexus 7 and I want to be able to use it as a honking big phone you can do it you've got to replace some system apps to be able to do it and of course there's no cellular circuitry or antennas inside so you got to do it over Wi-Fi and whatnot so it's kind of complicated but luckily we have an article we talked about that a pocket now there will be a link in the article at pocket now if you want to go and find out how to use your Nexus 7 as a phone but you can do that with root because you can replace some system files and some change some system configurations it's pretty easy if you follow the instructions precisely we'll just leave it at that some other stuff that route lets us do ironically it lets us backup and restore our phones and our tablets and our tablets and everything in between why can't we do that without root well you've got to be able to get down and have access to those system level files to be able to access and copy them off and without root you don't have that now theoretically you could if there was a backup API but of course there's not so the only way to really backup your device so that you can restore it later is you have root access it's kind of frustrating but that one reason alone to me is justification for rooting your device and there we have it unlocking and rooting in a nutshell and the bootloader if you didn't catch up on that make sure you watch last week's episode of Android power user if you've got any questions any comments if you've got recommendations for future topics please leave those over at pocketnow.com we'll have a link for it right here if you're not over on pocketnow.com already if you're watching this on the youtube channel make sure you head over to pocket now so you can leave comments over there that's where I will be to answer your questions and that's where the rest of the PocketNow staff will be to help with your comments your questions complaints and really anything else that you want to vent to us at that point if you've got some other cool stuff that you can do with route let us know that as well for PocketNow and the android power user I'm Joe Levi