A few questions on Android phones

Because I like to tinker

There is some stuff which needs rooting to fix e.g. the above shutter sound.

Also, arguably, it is desirable to disable all OTA (over the air) automatic updates, once the phone is configured as desired and everything is working. That needs rooting too.

Can you expand on that?

With the exception of apps like browsers (which tend to be buggy as hell all the time, so any update is “nice to have”) and email apps (which could be vulnerable to exploits), I cannot see the point in updating anything that works.

And the chance of the OS getting an exploit fed to it via the phone’s internet connection (wifi or 3G) is practically zero.

Just now I have been reading about some VOIP app which stopped working after an update because the patent holder for the G729 codec wanted some money off them, so they just deleted it

Sometimes they send you a nice bug :-) … but the next update always tales care of that.

That is the case if you stick to major/popular apps where if a bug appears, about 100,000 people scream all over the internet about it

Also Apple do a bit more testing than the Android app shop which is full of stuff that is borderline-unusable and a lot of it (probably more than 50% for your particular device) doesn’t work at all. Certainly, Android apps come with every imaginable combination of user interfaces…

There is an update for Memory Map which keeps nagging me, on the Ipad 2, and if I apply it I will lose access to a load of maps, because MM de-licensed the non-encrypted QCT format. MM couldn’t care a flying **** about its customers, IMHO.

I like latest and greatest, progress, updates, improvements.

OK; I was worried that I was missing out on some rational reason

It also turns out that one cannot do an Iphone-type of “total backup” without rooting the android phone. This is obviously very important… see here

Why google didn’t make a provision for this is mind-boggling. It is the one really outstanding feature of IOS; you can lose your Iphone and get another one and restore everything onto it. Well, there is still the I-messages thing

I mean a total backup of the entire device, in the sense that most people would understand “total”.

The phone has several ways of backing up “everything” to “the cloud” but these won’t restore a phone which was obtained to e.g. replace a lost/broken one. These methods just basically back up user data (messages, passwords, etc). Not apps you paid for.

There are subtle issues with doing a total backup, because it enables the creation of multiple devices all containing copies of licensed software, and every device after the 1st one will have bootleg copies running. Apple deal with this by keeping track of all your IOS devices and allowing IIRC five reinstalls. Google didn’t want to get involved in that, it seems.

That is why Titanium Backup needs a rooted device, and yes it can presumably be used to create multiple cloned phones. With great power comes a need for responsible behaviour

It still doesn’t deal with apps which are IMEI-locked but I haven’t seen any on Android – or at least have not noticed any. Symbian had that a lot, which was a PITA when you had to restore a backup but the original software outfit had vanished. I lost some really valuable apps that way. OTOH there are probably apps which will fake the IMEI presented to the app – Symbian had that facility eventually. Normally there is no practical way to rewrite the actual IMEI. Presumably Apple ban developers from IMEI locking, because it would make a mess of their backups.

On Windows this is trivial – use Trueimage (etc) to do an image backup of the whole hard drive. But I don’t believe there is an equivalent app for Android, which creates an image backup of the whole flash chip.