I’ve written this blog post about moving from rooted Samsung to a Pixel running GrapheneOS. It’s a list of every root tool that I used, with a note on whether I’ll miss it. I wrote it as a checklist for myself initially, and decided to add links and more comments and publish it. Turns out I don’t really need root, which truly surprised me.
Do you have any apps or tools that hold you back from leaving root?
Thank you for posting this. It’s interesting to see someone else who has walked similar paths, and not just see what you did, but read about how you felt about it and how you decided to do things and how you felt afterwards.
I also went from rooted Android (LG, Motorolla, OnePlus, etc. to GrapheneOS. (custom Windows Mobile Roms before that ~ not even Windows Phone, Windows Mobile…) I miss some of the customizability that custom Roms and root gave me, but surprisingly I don’t miss root that much.
I used root mainly to block ads and theme/modify visual elements. I still block ads, just network wide and not on an individual device level. I did use it for some other stuff and have tried a handful of the things on your list.
Similar to your root situation, something that caused me ongoing grief and difficulty is degoogling. Like you mention with freezing apps, I haven’t been able to fully cut out all the google stuff though over the course of the last year, I have gotten very close. I made a Lemmy post asking for help a while back and made significant progress with my remaining proprietary dependencies thanks to people’s kind suggestions. I hope to share with the community again the next time I redo an Android device.
Btw, I love the site: very Y2K; very small web.
It’s great to hear someone found it interesting :) I’ll be looking forward to your notes on degoogling. And I’m glad you like my website, I really love the current small web revival, even though I’m too young to have experienced the original small web times of the internet.