rooted?

[AC Question]

What does rooted mean?

 

[SpookDroid]

In a nutshell, it means granting access to all of the files in your phone, including the Operating System and boot information, recovery files... the works.

If you're familiar with iOS lingo, the closest equivalent would be jailbreaking. Basically, when you root, all bets are off and you're free to modify anything and everything about your phone, giving you and any app that is coded for it, permission to read, write, overwrite, and rewrite anything and any file in your phone.

This is where the danger comes. It can be a blessing since you can modify mostly anything and install custom ROMs with cooler features than those that came with your phone originally, but it can also mean that you can accidentally delete something that was vital for your phone to work or if you download something malicious, it can access anything in it without your knowledge (it is, after all, easier to hide when you're doing something nasty when you hold the keys to the vault, right?).

 

[Yvonne Baldwin]

So not the same as unlocked I guess. I have unlocked ATT galaxy note i717 on metro service. Wud luv to be able to remove some apps that came on it. Not something I wud do myself tho! thx for info.

 

[SpookDroid]

Nope, not the same. Unlocked simply means that your phone can operate with any compatible SIM card for any compatible network/carrier and not is not, well, locked, to a specific carrier SIM.

You can still 'freeze' some apps even if you're not rooted, but if you want to remove bloatware, then yeah, you'd need to root your phone to do so. Just remember, make sure you do a little research and find out which bloatware apps are actually safe to delete and which ones are not. You might not cripple your phone, but you might affect your service if you delete something the carrier requires.

As for freezing apps, just go to the Application Manager, 'ALL' tab, and from there, tap on each application. If you can turn it off, then it can be frozen. If not, it means it's a system app or a carrier-enforced app (note that you can have non-essential system or carrier apps, though. For instance, some Samsung tablets list the annoying and mostly useless NYTimes app as as a system app, and thus, cannot be uninstalled, but it can be turned off).