I’m about to get a new phone, and I found a YouTube video on how to “root” the phone.
There is no narrative and the only explanation on the web page is that by rooting it, I can be a “Super user.”
2 questions: 1. What will I be able to do that I couldn’t do before? What are the odds that doing this will fuck up my phone somehow?
If the phone comes with a boatload of default apps, you should be able to disable them. Some people find that taking the bloatware off the phone extends the downtime battery life, as these useless apps aren’t running in the background checking to see if something you don’t care about is happening.
And you can start wearing a cape.
Rooting is beneficial in some ways and not in others. With rooting you have the ability to do more with the phone, the biggest for the average user being the ability to back up the operating system and to back up the apps and data quite easily. When a phone is not rooted, usually this is either more difficult (data) or not possible (apps). Having backups of your apps means when a new update breaks functionality you can roll back to the previous installation. This is impossible without root. There are other things that are possible with a rooted phone, such as installing app packages from outside the google play store, but this is not usually something the average user needs. Rooting is also the path to installing a different operating system than the one it came with. A popular alternative for example, is Cyanogenmod. And if you do not like all the apps the phone comes with, rooting will allow you to remove some. However this can be dangerous as some apps control basic features (such as the ability to make calls) and uninstalling them will screw up your phone’s functionality. There is a way to carefully test which ones you can and cannot remove but basically, rooting also gives you this option.
Rooting is not without drawbacks. It is possible to screw up the process and soft brick your phone, making it difficult to recover if you’re not an advanced user. Also, your provider usually does not like your phone to be rooted or other operating systems to be installed. It may void your warranty and unless you’re able to handle some advanced techniques they will know what you’ve done as the phone keeps track of low-level changes like that.
So in short:
Pros:
Cons:
There are really two types of apps that are the most helpful on a rooted phone:
Backup (as the other guy said)
Titanium Backup is the most common app in that category
Ad Blocking:
Ad Block plus
AdAway
Are both good and either require root or work better with root.
Note you can block ads in browser without root if you download firefox mobile and then the adblock add-on, but the standalone apps block ads in some other apps/places as well.
This is somewhat deciding for me, unless I find there are a shitload of pointless apps to get rid of.
One phone I used to have only had 8GB of internal memory and wouldn’t let you put apps on the memory card. So, I was always clearing caches, deleting unused apps, etc., to try and stay below the 8GB. If the phone was rooted, you would be able to move phones to the card, plus clear the bloatware out of the internal memory.
ETA: If you wanted to use the mobile hotspot feature, and didn’t want to pay the telco for using your data that way, rooting the phone would sometimes allow you to turn that feature on.
This depends. On the more recent android systems and systems based on stock android, the functionality of moving to SD is no longer an option. It used to be available even without root but it apparently caused too many issues. You can still do it with root, but it’s a complicated process involving third party apps that isn’t usually worth it.
And yes, I forgot that rooting the phone can (depending on system) make it dead easy to use your phone for tethering (i.e. feeding your phone’s data connection to your laptop for internet activities where there is no wireless/wired available) even if that’s not normally a feature offered by your provider. Hence why your provider isn’t giddy about you rooting your phone.
Have a look at the xda-developers forum. You can plug in your specific phone in the search and see what other users have done. Be aware they are really snarky about people who ask questions without doing some searching first, but over all a good bunch of people.
I waited until my warranty period expired before I rooted and put a custom ROM my S4 Mini and got rid of a ton of useless crap that Samsung kept pushing. I also installed Cyanogen Mod so I am using the newer version of Android before it gets released by my carrier. I also read about 120 pages to educate myself before I took the plunge.
Just stick a bigger SD chip in it and ignore the undead Samsung stuff. $20, problem solved, no warranty or carrier hassles. 
There was an article over the weekend about how Koreans think US phones are about one step over an old crank-box because they’re so used to enormously bloated apps with complex animated interfaces and voracious data demands. I infer that there’s no such thing as data limits in Korea.
Note that simple rooting a device is easier and less risky than installing a new OS like CyanogenMod. (Which sometimes requires a bootloader unlocker, which is trickier than simple rooting.)
On my devices (not technically phones, but not a big diff.):
Nook Simple Touch: Rooted only. Allowed me to remove a bunch of battery draining useless apps. Divorced myself from the B&N store and I have installed several apps. E.g., I use FBReader instead of the default B&N reader.
Nook HD+: Rooted and installed Cyanogen Mod. I have a nearly up-to-date OS with the apps I want.
The short summary of pros:
Cons:
I paid someone to put cyanogenmod on my old phone, and it was great. It has wifi sharing built in, so you can be a hotspot for others. Of course, it helps to have a great data plan.
It was great, and then the phone stopped recognizing the data signal, and I couldn’t get G Maps to work. I went back to the stock OS, and then there was some update kind of notice, and I pressed OK before I realized what it was, and it stopped responding at all, and put the whole screen display in an area about 1/10 the normal size.
But if I had a backup phone, I would definitely consider running Cyanogenmod again. It’s a leader in features. But I’m happy enough with Kit Kat for now.
If you root you can flash an updated version of android on your phone.
Most phones will not receive android updates past the age of 2 years (many not past 1 year). This is because most phone creators don’t want to work on providing their version of Android for aging phones (even flagship phones).
Unless you have a Nexus, which gets its update immediately and regularly (the aging Nexus 4 got the latest 5.1.1 stock lollipop update in May -the day of it’s release-), you cannot take advantage of any new security features or enhancements.
It seems that while your phone, the LG Ultimate 2 (L41C), was released just last year (and runs kitkat 4.4) it’s a special one that currently attracts zero interest from the modding community. So you have no need to worry about trying to update your phone via that route (at least for the foreseeable future).
A similar thread I started a few years ago.
Rooting can void warranties, so there’s that. In my case, I did finally get around to it, because of the ability to use Tasker + Secure Settings to automatically turn on the GPS. I did very little other customization. Also, I was not able to install much of the bloatware, even with an add-on program that lets you uninstall such things.
I did try to get it set so that the passcode unlock is disabled if I’m connected to my home wi-fi, but that never actually worked so I gave up on it.
The downsides have been:
Why can’t you upgrade the OS once you’ve rooted?
You can; it is dependent on a few factors. Some phones can be reverted back to stock form, and you can get updates from your carrier.
In some cases, it trips a flag or burns an efuse (non resettable) to let the carrier know you have modded your phone, in which case, you may not be able to get warranty coverage or updates through the carrier or the manufacturer.
In my case, I rooted the phone which was no problem. I could revert back to stock and no harm, no foul.
I then installed a custom ROM (basically the OS) and kernel to enable me to tweak my power usage and unlock features that Samsung delightfully walled off to encourage me to buy a bigger better faster phone. This tripped the dreaded Knox flag so now I cannot go back to stock and expect OTA (over the air) updates through Telus. No big deal for me because Samsung has no intention of updating my phone to Lollipop. I am running Cyanogen Mod Lollipop instead and it has been fairly painless. Since the phone is out of warranty, I’m not worried when it comes time to replace it.
Depending on the phone you have, you may be able to recover from a brick and restore it completely to its out-of-the-box state no matter what you have done to it; in this case you don’t need to worry about these issues. For the popular models, you’ll usually find numerous helpful Youtube videos that cover every possible thing you might need to do–rooting, unrooting, recovering from brick, etc. You do have to be very careful to make sure the video you’re watching applies to the exact model and regional edition of the phone that you have. If he’s done videos for your phone, I highly recommend Youtuber QBKing77.
Besides allowing you to remove bloatware, the rooted state is required for a number of very useful and popular apps that have mainly to do with system maintenance and housekeeping. You can usually also edit certain system files directly to bypass certain OEM-imposed restrictions like not being able to silence the camera shutter. Rooting also allows more freedom as to moving apps to the external SD card, if applicable.
But, wait, there’s even more. If your phone is rooted, you can replace the OEM installed Android OS with a customized version (“custom ROM”); if you have an older phone with limited storage and RAM this can greatly improve performance. OTOH, certain custom ROMs will disable your carrier’s PRL update tool. I used to install custom ROMs on my earlier phones. My first-ever Android had about .5G RAM all told, and no internal data storage to speak of; custom ROMs like Hydro and CyanogenMod were godsends that made a huge difference. OTOH with higher end Samsungs and similar models, I’ve found that rooting but keeping the stock ROM works best for me.
As has been said, you’d do that if your phone comes with pre-loaded, uninstallable apps you want to get rid of, or if you want to replace it with a different build of Android (like Cyanogenmod) entirely. But since my most recent experience with Android (on a “flagship” Nexus 5) was so miserable, I’d advise you not to buy an Android phone at all. Goddamn battery-sucking pieces of shit.
There’s also some interesting apps you can run that require a rooted phone, that require lower-level access to the network capabilities that aren’t available to non-rooted phones.
I had one that took advantage of a login security flaw on many sites, and whenever someone logged into some places like Yahoo Mail or Facebook on my network, it gave me full access to their accounts. I didn’t do anything with it, and uninstalled the app since it may have been illegal. And don’t ask what app it was, I do not remember nor would I mention it here since it’s likely against board rules. Plus, I would hope those flaws are fixed by now.