Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by hellisothers | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hellisothers

What does having root on your phone improve for you?

View on HN

A few example of the top of my head:

- DriveDroid to boot a PC, I haven't used a USB stick to boot off in... years?

- /etc/hosts

- Viper4Android for system wide EQ

- Messing with user hostile apps such a firefox when they disable your addons although they still work, proven by the fact that I was able to make them work again as root

Edit: more things

- Wireguard kernel module

- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself

you can add as many of these as you want, i'm not giving up root. The crippled API model that's in fashion these days kills innovation.

Ha, havent heard from that app in years! DriveDroid's file-backed USB-thumbdrive emulation is marvellous. Pick your .iso or whatever image, insert & boot your machines from it. No more searching for and fiddling with usb drives needed. It needs usb-gadget+mass storage module support in the Android kernel though. Miss it.

If you don't want to be leaving your phone plugged into PCs that you've booted, you might look into the "iodd" brand devices - either enclosures that you can put your own SSD into or the Mini series that comes with (I think) an mSATA drive already installed.

The Mini has a better screen for switching between ISOs and virtual disks.

> - Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself

This is possible on iPhones isn't it? I definitely remember Fiddlering my self a few years back on my iPhone.

Yes, you can definitely do this on iOS. Mitmproxy for example works by installing a trust profile (or something like that, can’t remember the name).

You used to be able to do this on android, and then they changed it that you can only sort of do it, unless you have root.

Root is an insurance (to a degree) against apple changing their mind, like google did.

- Adding a CA to the trust store to MITM yourself <-- or to work around Let's Encrypt's old certificate root expiring by manually adding the new one

- GravityBox for various UI tweaks and making volume control a little more fine-grained

- UMS Enabler to expose your external SD card as an USB drive (accessing it via MTP isn't really fun and doesn't work everywhere [1])

- proper local backups and therefore the ability to e.g. relatively painlessly revert borked app updates

- sometimes due to bugs cruft accumulates in data directories that as a regular user can only be cleaned by – depending on the nature of the bug – clearing the whole application data [2] (which is already annoying enough as it of course also means wiping all your settings and other stuff you might actually want to keep), completely uninstalling and reinstalling the app [3], or even wiping the whole phone [4].

[1] E.g. the local state library has a nice book scanner available for public use. You can either e-mail yourself the results (but that only works reliably up to a certain file size), or else save them on an USB drive. I didn't have an USB drive with me, but thanks to UMS Enable I could just plug in my phone, switch my external SD card to USB mode and voila.

[2] It seems that e.g. possibly as a result of /etc/hosts blocking via AdAway some apps accumulate telemetry data that they cannot send (Fabric / Crashlytics seems to be the particular culprit here) and after a few weeks that amount of data can reach a notable size.

Another example was that due to some sort of bug Google's TTS app (Speech Services) kept accumulating TTS voice packs after updates and wouldn't delete the old versions, and by the time I noticed they were occupying a few hundred MB.

[3] Don't know of a current example, but during the days of Android 4.1.2, Android had a bug whereby if a native library was removed from a future APK version (respectively renamed), then Android wouldn't remove the old copy of the library when installing an update. Skype was a particular culprit there, because their native library was around 25 MB and included a version number in its filename, so each time that library was upgraded an additional 25 MB file was plonked onto the file system, with the old file remaining behind. Without root, the only way to remove those superfluous files was by completely uninstalling the app.

[4] I occasionally find system RAM dumps appearing under /data/ss-ram-dumps. I've got no idea whether they eventually get cleaned up automatically, or if they would just accumulate and take up more and more space until you're forced to wipe the whole phone.

> proper local backups

What do you use for your backups?

I've used Titanium Backup in the past, but it has some issues in Android 11 and seems to no longer be maintained.

Trying OAndBackupX (recently rebranded as NeoBackup) but the results are not great. Hoping the next major version cleans it up.

I tried looking for a replacement app for that last year or so, but didn't find anything really satisfactory, either. Didn't try OAndBackupX, though, because my phone's currently too old, but "the results are not great" doesn't sound very encouraging, I guess :-)

So while it's a bit clunky, for now I'm relying on a combination of Titanium Backup (at least on my phone it's still working fine except for split APKs) + SAI to do an extra backup of split APKs.

So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic (though I do agree that since then they should have improved the status quo)

> So what should have firefox do then? Plenty of addons don’t work and they don’t have metadata on which do and which don’t. I don’t see how whitelisting is problematic

Here's how niche indie software handles this: https://i.imgur.com/6m809SB.png (excuse the sarcasm)

I don't care anymore though. I've switched browsers since, Mozilla is beyond help. Still, in that moment i was very glad to have root to override their bullshit.

Not the OP, but for me this is a matter of principle. If you don't have root on your device, it isn't yours, its the manufacturer's, and you're simply renting it. I rarely if ever actually use my root access for anything, but I guess I'm just philosophically opposed to buying a device designed to ensure I don't control it. Doubly so for a device that's so critical and enmeshed in my private life.

I use an app called X-Privacy which can block specific permissions in other apps.

For example, I see no reason why a calculator app needs access to my contacts, phone, or microphone, and X-Privacy will let me disable permissions to those specific resources for the calculator app while still letting me use it. As a bonus, it'll also put in fake data in to these apps when needed, so the apps continue working, thinking they have access to my data but they don't.

Something like this should be standard in every smartphone, but obviously phone OS makers don't value privacy enough, and even require root in order to allow you to do this.

I use a custom ROM on my Pixel phone to strip out all the user-hostile tracking. It works quite well honestly, no major usability sacrifices

Would the tracker blocking available on iOS at the OS level mostly suffice for this?

Not the person you asked, but no. Because that would mean you have to trust iOS to not track you. I can be convinced that Apple is less bad than Google in that regard, but if Apple has nothing to hide, then they can let me have root, so I can verify, right :) ?

SafetyNet?

Are you somewhere where banks won’t let you use their website and force app usage?

NFC payments?

That’s fair. Although I personally don’t need that tied to my phone. Maybe it could be substituted with contactless cards?

The advantage of phone NFC payments is that there's no limit, unlike with a card which is usually capped rather low (50/100€ here in France).

Essentially but not exactly. Their website is unusable on a phone. Just switching from mobile mode to desktop mode after login will expire your session.

Is this your custom ROM, or is it a widely known one?

LineageOS with MicroG

The principle of not letting a company or government have more power over a device you own that holds your private actions, whereabouts and even inner thoughts you communicate with those closest to you.

I'm not paranoid, but it's not the direction I want to see computing evolve in.

Did you hear about the free software philosophy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

The main point of it is that if you don't have the control over your computing, someone else has and they can use this power for their own advantage against you. Examples are numerous: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor....

I use https://github.com/sriharshaarangi/BatteryChargeLimit to keep my battery healthy so my phone stays functional longer.

Oh, and some scripts to fake input events so I can automate apps.

This is a built-in feature of iOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210512

on top of what lawl said:

- macros and scripts- it's nice not having to enable, disable etc stuff and just scan qr codes, nfc tags or use ble tags as markers to enable something

- chroot

- faking permisions and data for apps is a must

- sim links to app data folders for easy backup/restore

The first point: shortcuts in iOS is very very good.

I tap an NFC tag to open/close my garage door (the tag is outside, next to the door)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com