Warning: You may not want to root your Android phone after installing Lollipop
Chris Smith
While
regular smartphone users who choose an Android device might not be as
interested in customizing their mobile experience as more hardcore
Android fans, there are plenty of buyers who chose Android over iOS or
other mobile operating systems exactly because they have the liberty of
doing more things on Android than on anything else, including rooting
the device. However, this particular type of Android experience might
forever change starting with Lollipop, as Google has made some important changes in Android 5.0 in the way Android is updated.
As Android Police
reports, instead of Android over-the-air (OTA) updates patching each
file on a system partition individually as before, in Lollipop the OTA
script now updates the whole system as an “enormous block”.
That means that any
modifications made to such files will practically disable future Android
updates on the device. Therefore, Android tinkerers should always make
sure they revert back to a clean stock version of Lollipop before
applying any updates, and only then get back to rooting and/or
customizing it once the updates are installed.
Even so, Android Police says Google’s way of applying updates is a step in the right direction.
“From a technical standpoint,
the reason behind the change has to do with verified boot, which was
first introduced in KitKat,” the publication says. “Even though Google
has yet to enable this feature on a Nexus device, this move seems to
indicate that the company could be preparing to go that route in the
future. Even outside of verified boot, though, it makes all the sense in
the world to do OTAs this way. Patching the system block directly is
far faster than trying to patch a lot of individual files.”
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This article was originally published on BGR.com
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