Ever since the software giant Google Inc.

, released its Android Operating System, it has become popular with every day passed by. Although facing a tough competition from Apples iOS, Android continued to gain popularity especially in third world countries and amongst the middle class consumers; the reason being the cheap availability of the technology and its loose coupling with device. In other words, your device - a mobile phone in most cases - does not necessarily has to be a Google device. Google released an operating system which could be plugged and played (so to say) in most devices irrespective of their make. With such feature(s) Android soon become popular platform and, thus, various organisations, agencies and carriers started to come up with applications which would run on Android based devices. Nevertheless, to have a better grip of the market these carriers often times restricted access to certain features of their applications. Android Rootingwas the answer to such a pestering control! Android rooting is the process in which the user is allowed to have access control to the architecture or the under lying sub-system of the Operating System. In what follows in the post, we would briefly take a closer look into rooting and its swing of things.

Android Rooting
Android rooting gets its name because it is through this phenomenon that a user gets root access of the underlying Androids subsystem. This access is not a general access rather it is akin to the administrator level access of the operating system. It is because of this almost complete access of the operating system that a device can be totally rehashed. In it, it can facilitate everything from a complete removal of the underlying operating system to a complete change to the latest version released! We can better realize the root access in Android when we understand it in conjunction with the fact that Android is derived out of Linux-kernel and so gaining

administrative access of Android is similar to gaining access of any Unix-based operating system!

It is Rooting not Jailbreaking It is a misnomer to term rooting as the concept of jail-breaking. In Jail-breaking a concept linked with Apples iOS - a user does not has the access to complete remove the operating system to be replaced with an entirely new one; the locked bootloader prevents it. Similarly the sandbox mechanism does not allow apps to have root access of iOS over which they are running. Likewise, the sideloading mechanism would prevent all unchecked, unverified software to be installed on the iOS. And thus, we can observe that iOS provides various layers of security and all of which needs to be authenticated before the root access to iOS is provided or else you would have to jailbreak all such layers of defence to have root access! Unlike this, in Androids environment only a scanty number of devices lock their boot loaders. To complement this many device manufacturers, like HTC, Asus etc provide an easy guide to unlock their locked bootloaders. This not only gives a more holistic control of the device but also enables the feature to complete change the operating system! Similarly, sideloading apps are also generally permissible in Android environment. Thus, when the permissions are fairly, easily accessible there remains the real need to jail-break!

The Process of Rooting Although a bit technical (and so it might come to be esoteric) and the process might not be the same letter-to-letter when the devices vary, but in general, this is how rooting works. The process of rooting should always be used for ethically correct reasons and that is the reason we have to chosen an example where we would assume a bug in the firmware (Android). Whenever a bug is discovered it is fixed and the su binary generated after the rectification is copied to the current processs path and then it is granted (rooted) permissions through the chmod command and the changes can be logged by some supervising process about the elevated access grants to the process! The downsides: At times, however, granting root access is not always encouraged. Since rooting allows potentially dangerous operations to take place from anything like deletion of system files to the device drivers to any utility application created and installed by the carrier to - very importantly - even low level access to the hardware themselves. If handled improperly, the experiment might turn out to be a disaster destroying the device itself for good! And therefore, dabbling is highly discouraged with rooting. There is another issue with rooting: as it is quite obvious that any changes made to the underlying OS through rooting can easily be detected (changed are logged for that reason). Now if the device breaks down for any reason, even reasons not directly related to the rooting manipulations, yet many companies might have a policy to void any warranty with the device thus leaving the user in a catch-22 situation! Finally, as stated earlier, that for business policies, many third party carriers restrict a fuller access to some of their applications, however, through rooting it can be easily manipulated. This has particularly provoked a lobby of organizations. Manufacturers

complained about the potentially flawed functioning of the device due to the assimilation of unofficial software and the cost incurred to maintain/fix it. Nevertheless, as governments and companies come up with newer policies things are expected to change when the carriers would start to accept the notion.