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Comment by 4cao | Hacker News Reader

> What benefits are you guys reaping from taking root, these days?

On stock Android 12+ (LineageOS 19+), superuser access is necessary even to customize the default color scheme. (Except on Google Pixel devices, which have the UI for this built-in: but that's proprietary, not part of AOSP.)

The most common use cases would be easily installing and updating apps from third-party stores (such as F-Droid through their Privileged Extension) [1] and ad blocking.

1. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged/

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If you install lineageos from microg

https://lineage.microg.org/

then F-Droid will already be installed with system extensions and you won't need root.

Being "rooted" can mean different things, so I'm answering in the broadest sense.

You're right of course. You don't need actual superuser access to the live system to make it work (only through recovery). And, as is the case with LineageOS for MicroG, it can already be integrated into the custom OS.

Thing is, when you start doing such things, the next step is often "rooting" the device anyway, so that you can hide what is considered being "rooted" (which can be as little as running any custom OS) from APKs with "root detection" that otherwise refuse to run.

+1, these fdroid updates are going to be a dealbreaker if I buy another android.

AFwall+ I can't use a mobile device without a firewall

all roms need root.

What do you mean by "need root"? To flash? A few comments above people were mentioning how grapheneos was explicitly against rooting, so not giving users root during runtime is definitely a thing.

he means you can't install custom ROM without unlocked bootloader which is essentially root access

Root access and unlocked bootloader are very different things. Many apps need root access to work, and having an unlocked bootloader won't help. On the other hand, installing another ROM requires an unlocked bootloader, but having root access won't help with it.

you can't have root access without unlocked bootloader, simple as that

I can access everything as root from recovery with unlocked bootloader without having actual root in system, root just make it more convenient after proper boot

> you can't have root access without unlocked bootloader, simple as that

Various EoP exploits for the kernel begs to differ. That said, even though your statement is broadly true, conflating unlocked bootloader and root access in the OS under an umbrella term of "root" is still sloppy terminology. The terms are related, but don't mean the same thing. For instance, many x86 PCs essentially have locked bootloaders by default (secure boot), but you can still get root access on them because the operating system explicitly allows it.

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