Back in the day - rooting Android phones and installing custom ROMs were such a big part of Android. I remember so well using titanium backup and Greenify and Cyanogenmod and the list goes on.
Is it still necessary to root in 2023 though?
I have been on vanilla Android without root access for the past couple of years and at this point most root features have made it into the vanilla Android OS. What are your thoughts?
I haven’t rooted in a long time. But if you tell me there is an app out there that can restrict or deny apps background usage (to increase deep sleep state %) and that you can only do it with root.
Then I’d say root might be necessary in those situations.
For example WhatsApp is the number one standby battery drainer in my phone. If I check partial wakelocks like 70% of them have the WhatsApp logo. (In BBS app). If I had a way to reduce them by 90% just keeping new messages and call working and root is needed for that then I’d want to root my phone.
I tried “Apps Ops” and it let me deny some of the permission. But maybe there is something more restrictive out there that needs root.
I’d check out Greenify, it has root and nonroot modes. I’ve found it to greatly increase my deep sleep when used religiously even without root
But isn’t Greenify outdated or they still update it?
Another thing I’m thinking: I’m interested in running some adb shell command every few minutes or hours to change the WhatsApp standby bucket from active to working_set that seems to reduce a lot of wakelocks.
Currently my standby (after tweaking for days) is not that bad. Like 0.4% per hour at night using wifi when I go to sleep.
WhatsApp despite of the restrictions I added is still the app with most partial wakelocks.
Looks like it hasn’t had updates since 2019, but if it ain’t broke why fix it?
Yeah I agree with that.
But generally apps that do something more advanced get outdated every year with new android versions with different permissions and API. This is why I was asking.
But I guess this app has nothing that got impacted.