Rooting a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active

[mgwarren]

Anyone Root a Samsung S5 Active ? ... if so what did you use ? and how did it go ?

I recently purchased a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active (unlocked) which was originally distributed by AT&T... after swapping the SIM card from my old phone I am now using it on another network and everything works fine... However, I would very much like to get rid of all of the Bloatware and AT&T apps (all of which in std mode is not possible)... hence my interest in Rooting the phone (an activity I have not previously done)... the first (2) "One Click Root" and "King Root" indicated that they did not support Rooting my phone/OS/Build (not sure which part)...
i.e. my S5 Active is:
Samsung SM-G870A
Android ver. 5.0
Build #: LRX21T.G870AUCU2B0F2

 

[Doubledeeznuts]

From what I have read over the past 2 months the only way was if you didn't let it update from 4.4.2 kitkat when you first turned it on. Now that it has version 5.x you are screwed. I am in the same boat as you. Bought my phone from amazon 2 months ago. Didn't know a thing about rooting , roms, nothing,...was upgrading from a 2009 garmin phone. pulled my old mini sim from that phone, with at&t, trimmed it down to micro sim size and slapped it in the new phone, boom, no contract, new phone, same plan...good to go. 2 days later it starts downloading updates from at&t, I was like cool....maybe it will update itself all the way to marshmallow.....nope. stopped at 5.1.1 and I dislike the white blinding white back grounds when you go into settings. no way to fix it either, none that I can find. So far I've inverted colors to black, under the vision settings option. tried a bunch of free crap on the g, play app store but nothing changes the settings background. I'm stuck with it. One trick I did find to do about the bloat ware was to disable all of them, and set them to never update, ever. I had to factory reset the phone 4 times though before I learned how to do that. the key is to keep it off of wifi until you lsolate and lock down all those apps before you let it connect for the first time. It's like trying to pin down a virus. So, I'm only running ccleaner, firefox,google play services,googleplay store,Lookout,and translate as active apps on this phone so far. everything else is disabled. mobile data stays off. gps stays off, everything I can think of is shut off and not allowed to update itself. I managed to free up 9.67gb of available space on the core storage and I just added a 32 gb sd card. Before with all the bloatware updating and running there was only 6gigs free on the phone. This is the best I can do. Maybe someone else can chime in if they have a better solution. I see canada s5 actives are running 6.x software....maybe at&t will get with the program....and push it to us.

DD

 

[mgwarren]

Thanks... appreciate the feedback... and yeah... have walked pretty much the same path other than am on 5.0... have also disabled all my AT&T stuff as well... but would love to give it as well as a bunch more the heave ho... BS that they lock this crap up... I mean are these our phones or what ? sheesh...

 

[mgwarren]

After looking a bit more I found this site which seems to offer the possibility of a work around... anyone have any thoughts on this route ?

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