Rooting/Jailbreaking Your Phone

[Shorty]

Has anyone done this? I'm thinking of rooting my new Galaxy S5. I'm already finding that the battery doesn't last more than about 16-18 hours. I don't have an incredible amount of apps, I've tried to disable/turn off many apps that I find useless. I rarely set the screen brighter than 25%, so on and so forth - all on Powersaving mode. Sure, there is an Ultra Powersaving mode, but I find that it's too restrictive for me.

I'm a little bit wary, but I've been doing some reading and apparently it's possible to reinstall your phone system to the factory OS. So I'm wondering if anyone has done this and found any benefits to doing it.

[Night Fury]

I found that my Samsung Galaxy S2 battery was just terrible, and towards the end of me having it, it would just crash and switch itself back on with like 7% battery. I use an iPhone now and honestly the battery on that is incredible.

[LocoColt04]

I've got a Note 3 that, with "average" use, can go two full days without a charge, and in theory it has a worse battery than what they dropped into the S5. Now, if it's a slow day at work and I blow a bunch of time screwing about on the internet, it'll only go about 20 hours, so maybe what you're seeing isn't terribly inappropriate. Make sure you kill off your apps when you're done using them, and if you don't want to have push notifications, you can set your apps to check every 15, 30, etc minutes so that it's not connected to the internet and/or data 100% of the time. That will definitely offer up some increased battery for the long haul.

Having said that, I've yet to root a Samsung phone, but I've done it before with other devices. The biggest trick is making sure you clone your data just in case anything goes wrong. There's a great little app called Samsung Kies that will give you access to everything on the device - you can hook it up to your PC and do a full backup that way. Doing so over wifi is also useful.

[Shorty]

I do what I can to keep app use to a minimum during the day, but what's the point of having a nice expensive phone if you're too afraid of using it due to battery drainage? I'm not playing videos all day or streaming music, and I definitely don't have WiFi connected, which I know can rain battery. I also know that there's no real way to "kill" apps and that task managers for Android are essentially useless, if not more battery draining. I reject the idea that a brand new smart phone cannot last atleast twenty-four hours of moderate, normal use. I'm just afraid to tinker with operating business, I guess.

I've definitely been using Kies for a few years! How did the rooting affect the devices you performed it on?

[LocoColt04]

I practically turned a Palm Pre into an Android phone... and then I got an S2 like a week later, so it was short-lived.


edit: OH AND

I saw you were using Powersaving mode. Don't do that. That's a bad idea. The mode itself will drain battery trying to kill things that drain battery. Just keep your brightness under 25% when you don't need it up, and sincerely consider removing push notifications if you are really concerned with your battery life.

Keep bluetooth off if you don't use it.

Throw the phone into Airplane mode when you are in meetings or go to movies and such, as it will stop communicating with the outside world, and keep you from being tempted to do the same.

Turn off Sync if you don't want the phone to check for updates with your gmail contact list (and every app you have it linked to) every thirty minutes.

Turn off Air gesture, Air view, and the NFC features when you aren't utilizing them.

There are a lot of AWESOME built-in features that definitely don't need to be on when you aren't taking advantage of them. Phew. That was a big edit.

[Shorty]

Sweet! Well, I still have my Galaxy S3, so I think I will test on that before trying it on my S5.

[Vyk]

I've rooted all my devices now. It's perfectly harmless most of the time, especially with the more popular devices. There's walkthroughs and tools all over the place to help you through. It doesn't really help battery life just rooting it though. But once it's rooted you then have the ability to take off all the bloatware (not by default however, sometimes certain apps can help remove unwanted apps, other times you have to acquire a custom version of your firmware that doesn't have those apps with it. This wipes out everything and you have to re-download all your apps)

More powerful devices rarely need to be rooted anymore. But there's no real reason not to root either. It's handy if you want to install an ad-blocking app and stuff. And it really helps file managers and virus scanners to have root access too

[LocoColt04]

Oh good, you posted; I don't have to make a second edit.

This is what mine usually looks like; keep in mind, GPS tracking also takes up a huge chunk of battery, as it flips on with almost every single app these days, so you should bump that fella off too if you're not keen on him.

Screenshot (11-26PM, Sep 03, 2014).png Screenshot (11-30PM, Sep 03, 2014).png

My phone hasn't seen a charger in the last ten hours, and I charged it up to 93% before removing it. For what it's worth, I have push notifications ON for every app, and have GPS on most of the time because I have a tracker on it in case it disappears.

Another good piece of advice though? Be on wifi as much as possible. Being off of your carrier's data service will DRAMATICALLY reduce battery drain.


Unrelated;
I had to crop those down to size because I didn't realize they were 1080p screenshots.

[Shorty]

I am on WiFi when I'm at home, but I don't worry about sucking battery so much because I can leisurely charge my phone as I wish. If I'm out of the house, it's not so certain. I also have GPS off unless I am navigating. How th hell do you go down only 6% battery in ten hours? Have you not used your phone at all?

Thanks for the post, Vyk! Yes, I am primarily interested in disabling bloatware apps.

[LocoColt04]

In the ten hours noted;

Missed 1 phone call
Placed 2 phone calls; durations 4:52 & 3:01
Missed 1 phone call (it rang to Google Hangouts and I answered it on my Desktop instead)

Sent 10 SMS messages, including one MMS picture
Received 9 SMS messages

Read 14 emails over three accounts
Responded to 1 email

Took 3 pictures
Uploaded 1 picture to Twitter while harassing you <3
Took 3 screenshots
Uploaded 2 screenshots to Google Drive (so I could download and edit them and post them in this thread)

Spent roughly 15 minutes on Facebook over wifi
Spent roughly 20 minutes on Twitter over wifi
Spent roughly 10 minutes reading an article on Chrome over 4GLTE while getting some fresh air

Watched 2 YouTube videos totaling 6:14 over wifi

Trolled through today's Instagram feed for roughly two minutes



I haven't left the house today - I had today off. The drainage is usually more like 30-35% in a ten hour period.

[Shorty]

I've disabled all push notifications for apps I don't care about, but there are some I do indeed want to receive notifications for. I turned off Google Now and some Google account syncing - basically everything that isn't gmail. I've had most of the stock apps turned off since day one - geonews, flipboard, allcast, etc. I don't have any of the fancy features like air gesture, NFC, smartstay, etc.

I think I've managed to turn off absolutely everything that I don't actually use. I'll test the battery life, etc, but I still think I'm going to root my phone!

[Vyk]

There should also be a battery review option in system settings. It'll list which apps and features are wearing down your battery the most. Though I doubt it'll help much. Internet services and the display are the likely culprits. But that would simply indicate you're messing with your phone too much xD Speaking of which, do you frequently check it?

[Shorty]

I check it so-so. The display and Android system are the primary offenders, yeah. However, since making whatever changes I've made this morning, the battery performance seems substantially improved.

[Vyk]

Yeah. I think it's like saving money. Once you're consciously aware of it, it gets easier to do. Keeping an eye on apps and managing what they do and when. Which is why I said you may not even need to root, and rooting won't instantly help battery life. But rooting still isn't bad. Definitely gives more options. But it's really up to you, and I tend to usually vote for rooting regardless. Just think you should be aware that you don't have to go through the trouble unless you really want to

[o_O]

Before I say anything, I just have to say that improving battery life is not a good reason to root your phone, and you will most likely be disappointed by any battery performance gains from other ROMs. Most of the time, battery drain on custom ROMs will be worse than stock ROMs. When it comes to jacking up the battery life, like others have said, your best friend is keeping the screen brightness down. Switching wifi off when you're outside your house is also a big battery-saver.

There are, however, many great reasons to root. You can access all of your phone, you can do things like changing the boot animation, adding boot sounds, changing the partition layout, adding extra security features... the list goes on. My two favourites are the Xposed Framework (lets you customise your Android in crazy ways without messing with cumbersome and dangerous system files) and Titanium Backup (backs up all your apps and data and lets you restore everything when you flash a new ROM).

Rooting your phone is fun and harmless, IF you make sure you understand a few things about your phone first:

1. You know what your carrier is, and whether you are using a CDMA or GSM network.
2. Using the previous point, you know which ROM/version of the ROM you need to flash to your device.
3. You know whether you want to go stock Android (AOSP) or an OEM skin like HTC's Sense or Samsung's Touchwiz.
4. You understand whether you need to upgrade the radio or not (99% of the time NOT, but messing with your radio is one of the few things that can brick your phone even after rooting).
5. If it's the first time the phone is to be rooted, you need to be clear on what you need to flash and in what order. Usually it goes like this:
- Unlock bootloader
[- S-OFF your bootloader IF required (and if available for your device), usually it's a convenient but not completely necessary step.]
- Flash recovery
- Flash superuser zip via recovery.
6. If you want to go on and flash custom ROMs, it goes like this:
- Perform a full wipe of the device
- Flash kernel if you didn't S-OFF the device.
- Flash ROM
- Flash gapps
- Wipe cache

tl;dr: Rooting won't save your battery, do it anyway.