Since I was a child, I heard about phone rooting on some obscure YouTube video. It always felt like a weird thing 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 with tools like Neo Backup, like SMS or application data, without some proprietary and incomplete transfer application.

For a long time, I owned a Huawei and now a 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 phone ?”

The issue is that phones are often “OEM locked”, with means that in order to install anything else than the stock base OS, you must go into the deepest developer settings unlock the OEM through Fastboot to be able to flash any type of custom data on your phone important partitions.

For security reasons, 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 process is even worse because the phone requires a code to be unlocked, but the service that generated them closed in 2018.

After those 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 Play Services for my phone. I wanted to try a full open-source, “ungoogled” experience on Android.

I was then able to install Magisk which allow applications to fully access the system, which allows for full backups or unrestricted permissions. It felt pretty great, and I discovered many alternatives to the Google Applications, but I quickly discovered the sad truth: many important apps rely on Google Services, especially Google Maps to function properly: any transport application requires it to display their paths, and many others require a Google Account to work properly. While micro-G can technically replace it, it can require much modification and tweaks for it to really work.

I reinstalled back LineageOS with the Google Play Services, but I was still looking at alternatives open-sources FOSS applications to replace Google ones. This is how I started to use Nextcloud for my storage, FireFox as a browser, Aegis for 2FA, etc.

But then another issue appeared: this specific unofficial LineageOS build was unstable, especially the Realtek drivers on which the screen, the microphone, calls and WiFi were relying.

Thus, it was almost impossible to use my phone to make a call or receive them, listen to something on the internet, or even use the camera.

After some months, I went back to the stock HyperOS build, and everything worked perfectly again. I was still able to root my phone using Magisk to remove the bloatware, useless system application, and being able to back up applications and data.

Even though it did not work perfectly, I still learned a lot about how Android works
and how to use it to its full potential.

I hope that the future will bring better support for alternative OS, which is already happening with the project Treble that normalizes how vendors shall expose their components to the Android System, which then allows for flashing any Generic System Image on a compatible device.