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I'm thinking about rooting my cellphone. What do I need to know?

figmentPez said:

I'm thinking about rooting my cellphone. What do I need to know?

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...get the right shovel to dig it out? I don't know...

figmentPez said:

I'm thinking about rooting my cellphone. What do I need to know?

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What model is it?

Just rooting it? Or trying to install a new rom?

Depending on the phone, there isn't much to worry about. Just be mindful of what you install.

Doing so will also open yourself to lots of other stuff, so be especially careful of what you install afterwards. Don't want something like this to happen to you.

--Patrick

figmentPez said:

I'm thinking about rooting my cellphone. What do I need to know?

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Well, what you need to know depends largely on why you're rooting your phone. If you don't have a good reason to root it, then you should probably just avoid it to reduce the number of variables affecting how your phone operates - or more critically what things may cause it to stop operating.

Once you've figure out why, the how has lots of guides on the internet depending on the why. Want to install some additional app store? Follow their directions for rooting. Want to develop software? You don't need to root, but if you do some developer websites will show the way and what you can do once you've done that. Want to install malware on someone else's phone for investigative or prank purposes? Just don't do it, it's honestly not worth it. Want to use custom firmware or update to newer versions of the OS than your provider provides? The places you get your firmware will tell you how to do it.

If you're doing it just to do it, choose a project first. It doesn't have to be a good reason, but having a reason makes it a lot easier.

Once you've done it, you'll find that the process is similar for most rooting, and if you do it enough times you'll understand why the process is depends on what you're trying to achieve. Until then, just keep rooting, following guides, and you can get the phone to do what you want.

It's funny, I'm also considering it to get rid of the crap that I can't delete otherwise (lookin' at you verizon navigation)

Is this because you want to fill your phone with delicious Nougat?

--Patrick

GasBandit said:

What model is it?

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Motorola Moto G, 1st gen LTE model

stienman said:

Well, what you need to know depends largely on why you're rooting your phone. If you don't have a good reason to root it, then you should probably just avoid it to reduce the number of variables affecting how your phone operates - or more critically what things may cause it to stop operating.

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I don't have enough room in my phone's main storage for Hearthstone, and unfortunately Android is kind of stupid about using SD cards for programs. You can move (some) data over to the SD card, but even then you have to be able to install to the phone first. I've heard tell that there are programs that allow you to treat the SD card more like main memory if you root your phone.

There may be a way to do this without rooting, but I'm guessing Hearthstone's developers disabled this option. At any rate, it's worth investigating this option before rooting:

http://techgage.com/article/moving_your_non-movable_android_apps_to_an_sd_card/

If you have to root to move your app, here's a reasonable guide:

http://www.howtogeek.com/114667/how...y-default-move-almost-any-app-to-the-sd-card/

Looks like "link2sd" is the key word for the root method, you can probably find similar guides. A quick "moto g link2sd" seems to suggest you're not the first person looking into this, but I didn't see a nice guide for it. You'll probably have to wade through a lot of forum posts to glean any information from there if the regular link2sd guides don't work for you.[DOUBLEPOST=1472044375,1472044289][/DOUBLEPOST]I'm also seeing mentions of "app2sd" - don't know if it's better, worse, or meant to solve a slightly different problem, but might be worth looking into.

Good luck!

Also, from Marshmallow on (of your phone can run it), you can switch an SD card to being seen as "part of your local storage". Though that makes it useless as an SD card.

I think his problem is, he can't even install the app to then move it to SD because his internal storage is insufficient, so he's wanting to root so that he can install direct to SD. In this case, a move-app wouldn't help him.

The best I can tell, even with rooting it may be the case that you can only move apps to the SD card after installing. Hearthstone is so large that I only have enough room to install it when I have yet to install any other apps.

Also, methods to use the Android SDK to tell apps to install to the SD card by default don't work on my phone. It just ignores that flag and installs them to main memory. They can be moved to the SD card, but they won't install there.

I guess I'll just have to wait until I upgrade to a new phone, whenever that happens.

Woof, Android hearthstone uses in excess of 3GB. Looking around I can't see any easy way to install it directly to the SD card using another device, and as GB points out you can only move an app after it's loaded - and the Moto G first gen has 8GB or 16 GB versions, the 8GB version only has 5GB available to user.

So to load hearthstone you'd practically have to unload everything else on the phone, then load hearthstone, then move it to the SD. While you could load a newer version of android which allows you to treat the SD as internal storage, it appears that it lacks the performance to run the newer android OS versions acceptably.


The online guides for installing hearthstone on sd are from a year ago, and newer patch news suggests that these methods may no longer work. I'm not sure how to deal with it, to be honest, you can root and delete most things on your phone, install it, then move it, but my guess is that it'd break in months as they update the game. If you're really into it then I suppose it'd be worth it, but it sounds like a whole lot of pain to me.

I know you don't want to hear it, but it's probably better to upgrade your phone.

I'm afraid I have to agree... time for a new phone :/

The samsung s5 is pretty reasonably priced used today, and starts at 16GB internal.

If you're brave, you can always try to install cyanogenmod. That would get you up to marshmallow, and give you adoptable storage as an option. There are obviously risks associated with that process, so keep that in mind.
Also, if you use adoptable storage, make sure you use a high quality SD card. You don't want a slow card that starts to go bad within 6 months.

stienman said:

The samsung s5 is pretty reasonably priced used today, and starts at 16GB internal.

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And it's a pretty good phone...Though since the Marshallow update I've been having issues

Shakey said:

That would get you up to marshmallow

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Which will unfortunately run very slow on his older phone.

Bubble181 said:

And it's a pretty good phone...Though since the Marshallow update I've been having issues

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My son has one and has been happy with it, but I don't think he's been keeping up on the OS releases. We bought it earlier this year, it's $160 used on amazon right now, and while there were obvious scratches and dings on the case the phone has performed flawlessly, and in any case is leaps and bounds better than the older android tracfone he used to use. We are able to keep him on tracfone with the bring your own phone program, and it's costing us $100 per year for his service and all the minutes and texts he can use (it's not unlimited, he just doesn't use much).

stienman said:

Which will unfortunately run very slow on his older phone.

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Possibly, but it's cheaper than a new phone.

I'm willing to bet HS wouldn't run very well on that phone, even if you are able to install it to the SD card. The Hearthstone mobile app is rather intensive in its resource use. I have a fairly powerful, newer phone (Nexus 6) and it still chugs.