Rooting an Android Phone and Mobile Kangaroo

These days I’ve been working on a small Android project, and I finally decided I needed a “decent” Android phone on which to test some of my work. I bought an old, used, Samsung Galaxy S II in hopes that it would work with my hacky application. Alas, in its “natural” mode it would not do what I wanted it to do, so, of course, I decided to root it. Rooting of the mobile phones has become very commonplace these days, and since it has been ruled legal in the US there has been a mushrooming of sites and applications dedicated to this activity.

I am primarily an iPhone user, and even though I have never rooted an iPhone of my own, I’ve heard that it has become an almost automatic procedure, especially on some older phones. I was expecting at least that level of ease with Android phones, especially since Android is essentially based on an open source software (at least in theory) and there seems to be a large degree of overlap between the Android and Linux communities. So anyways, I start looking into various options for rooting my S II, and after a few futile attempts to accomplish this through “one click” software solutions, I start delving deeper into the Android developer world. And deeper. And deeper.

What I discover isn’t pretty. Not only is there a major difference of which subversion of Android your phone is running, but very different approaches are in order depending on your phone manufacturer and carrier. Not to mention the country and region in which they operate. So what started as a small side-project, and was promising to be a good educational experience, turns into a total nightmare. A couple of days later, after I’ve almost completely made my phone useless, I am ready to throw in a towel and declare a defeat. That’s when it occurs to me: there’s got to be a better way of going about this.

Since I am in the heart of the Silicon Valley this year, the first thing that comes to my mind is that someone else must have had this same problem before. In fact, many other people must have, just based on the sheer number of techies and half-techies that populate this region. And one of my favorite things about this place has always been the fact that if there is a problem out there in a real world, someone somewhere  has probably come up with a startup or a small business that addresses that particular problem.

So I Google the local business directory (what in the old days would have been known as “looking up in the phonebook”), and not entirely unsurprisingly, there are no real businesses that advertise smartphone rooting as one of their services. However, there are quite a few mobile phone repair shops, and I make an educated guess that they might be dealing with my problem in at least one of those. I drive to one such establishment, but after half-successfully trying to explain to the proprietor what I am ater (he spoke less-than-optimal English), I decide to drive somewhere else. However, I notice another shop on the same street named Mobile Kangaroo.

I go inside and am greeted with a very hacker-looking dude. The shop is far from ostentatious, but this to me is reassuring: these people are used to dealing with non-standard job requests. Sure enough, the hacker-dude assures me that he’s rooted many Android devices before, and uses an S II of his own. The charge for rooting a phone is just $20. I leave my phone there and come to pick it up in a couple of days. I get my cleanly rooted Android phone, and am happy as a clam. I wish I had explored this option from the get-go, but overall I’m happy with the final result. I am writing this blog post in hopes of helping someone else with the info on how to “professionally” get your Android phone rooted.

 

Bojan Tunguz

Bojan Tunguz was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he and his family fled during the civil war for the neighboring Croatia. Over the past two decades he has studied, lived and worked in the United States. He is a theoretical physicist with degrees from Stanford and University of Illinois. Tunguz has taught physics at several prominent liberal arts colleges and has been writing about physics, science and technology for more than a decade. He also has a wide spectrum of interests, and reads and writes about current events, society, culture, religion and politics. Over the years he has reviewed many of the books that he has read, and posted his reviews on various online outlets. In 2011 he had become a top 10 reviewer on Amazon.com, where he continues to be very active. Aside from reading and writing, Tunguz enjoys traveling, digital photography, hiking, and fitness. He resides with his wife in Indiana. You can follow my review updates on the following pages as well: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tunguzreview Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tunguzreviews Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104312842297641697463/posts

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