Six Reasons why you should root your Android phone

I recently had to get a new phone – my (not so trusty anymore) Droid 4 lasted about 2-3 hours of the charger, which doesn’t work so well while traveling.  Carrying external chargers isn’t very practical, so Leo Laporte’s review of the Moto X won me over.  So glad I got it, and it’s so nice to not have to worry if my phone is fully charged, or my portable power source has enough juice.

For now, I’m still on the Stock Moto X ROM, which is fine.  4.4 is coming soon, so I don’t need to install a custom ROM (yet).  But, I still wanted root, since there are a few reasons to root your phone, even if you keep the stock ROM.  Here’s a few reasons:

1.  Cerberus:  https://www.cerberusapp.com/  LoJack for your phone, but with root, it survives a factory reset!  It snaps a picture, silently, if you enter a wrong password when trying to unlock the phone.  Also has the usual, Wipe, locate, send an annoying sound to locate, etc..

2.  Titanium Backup:  http://www.titaniumtrack.com/titanium-backup.html  Titanium *really* backs up your phone.  It also lets you uninstall or “freeze” any bloatware that the manufacturer or carrier loads on your phone that you don’t need or use.  

3.  Root Call Blocker Pro:  http://fahrbot.co.uk/apps/8-root-call-blocker  Why?  Your phone doesn’t even make a sound.  It just blocks the call *before* it even gets to the Android dialer.  No other app can do this (that I’m aware of).  Other call blockers make your phone ring at least once.  Not this one.

4.  Network Spoofer:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/netspoof/  For showing people how easily people can take over an unsecured open WiFi, like at a coffee shop or your in-laws who don’t use WPA or keep their access point wide open.  It’s also kind of a funny app.  It’s funny to watch everyones facial expressions when they all get re-directed to the “Rick Roll” youtube video 🙂

5.  WiFi Protector:  http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1350941  protects you against #4 🙂  (or any app that does MitM attacks or otherwise does arp cache poisoning.

6.  DriveDroid:  http://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid  I can use my phone to serve up several bootable linux distributions for any PC, using a USB cable.  As a sometimes sysAdmin, this is a necessity, and having a few bootable linux iso’s ready to go, always on me is very useful.