Since I was a child, I heard about phone rooting on some obscure YouTube video. It always felt like an “unofficial” and h4ck3r-y think to do, but I understood way later how useful that can be. Rooting my phone would allow me to do absolutely whatever I want with it: removing useless bloatware, system applications, gain full access to my sensors, and especially a way to back up everything, like SMS or application data, without some proprietary and incomplete transfer application.

Since a long time I had Huawei and now Xiaomi phone, since they offer by far the best price and quality on the market, the biggest downside being the bloatware and the ads in the system applications. So I thought: “What if I rooted my phones ?”

The issue is that phones are often “OEM locked,” with mean you must go into the developer menu, and unlock the OEM through fastboot to be able to flash any type of custom data on your phone important partitions. For security reason, this implies a full reset of the device, which may be pretty annoying if you want to call someone or need to stay easily reachable.

Even worse, on Xiaomi, you will need to validate your phone number to the company, and after about 20 days, you might be able to unlock the OEM if the company accepted. My previous Xiaomi phone even totally refused to unlock the OEM because “my Xiaomi account score was too low.”

On Huawei, this would have been even worse since OEM unlocking requires a code that was once given on a section of their website depending on our serial number, but is now totally shutdown.

After these 20 days, I was able to unlock the OEM, and install TWRP on my recovery partition. I used it to install an unofficial LineageOS build without the Google Services for my phone (since the exact model is way too niche to have an official build). I wanted to try a full open-source, ungoogled experience on Android.

Then, I was able to install Magisk and make myself root. It felt pretty great, and I discovered many alternatives to the Google Applications, but I quickly discovered the sad truth: everyone relies on Google Services, especially Google Maps, in order to function properly: any transport application requires Google Maps to display their paths, and many others require a Google Account in order to work properly. While micro-G can technically replace it, it requires much modification and tweaks for it to really work.

So I reinstall everything with the Google Services, but still trying to use FOSS alternative such as F-Droid and Aurora Store for applications, Nextcloud for my storage, Firefox for my browser, Aegis for 2FA, etc… But another issue appeared: with an unofficial LineageOS build, everything is a bit unstable, and for me, it was the speaker of the phone that stopped working after some hours. Even worse: If I emitted a call or received a call, no matter it is cellular, Discord, WhatsApp, or anything else, my phone had a 90% probability of soft-locking, which is pretty ironic.

After some months, it just became way too annoying, for work or for family, so I went back to the officially supported OS on Xiaomi. Since I wanted the most recent Android version for its feature, I went with HyperOS, but I was still able to install Magisk to remove the bloatware and useless system applications.

Even through it was not totally successful, I learned many things about the difference between Android and Linux, the partition scheme and what is exactly rooting, and I can only wish these process were easier and that bank company or other application didn’t ban rooted device for poor reason, because the simple power of being able to back up your data is a thing that anybody should be able to do easily.