
Stock Firmware: When you're rooting and modding a phone, there's always a risk that things could go awry, leaving you with a soft-bricked device.Some phone makers allow you to reset this fuse and restore full warranty coverage, while other manufacturers keep track of its status by recording whether or not your account registered for a bootloader-unlock code. If you ever need to send your phone in for faulty hardware, the manufacturer will read the state of this fuse, and likely deny warranty coverage if it's been tripped.


For many folks, this level of customization is why they chose an Android device in the first place. Yet people still find ways around these hurdles, because rooting allows them to uninstall bloatware, block ads, and apply cool system-level mods and tweaks, among other things. Many manufacturers lock their device bootloaders and add extra layers of security to prevent users from rooting and installing a custom recovery. Superuser status isn't always easy to achieve, though.

That may not sound like a lot, but with over 2 billion Android devices out there, the math works out to over 150 million rooted phones - more than the total population of Russia, Mexico, or Japan - so root nation is an important demographic that deserves being catered to.

According to a study done by Kaspersky, 7.6% of Android users root their phones.
