One item that isn’t clear to me is the business of rooting an android phone.  On my phone, it plays the default animation.  I wanted to see if I could change it and from what I could tell, I could.  I had found several different methods to create and use custom animations, but they all require root access.  This video was specific to my model of phone.

What gets me is the amount of good faith I have to give to these apps.  Some root apps work by finding a fault with the phone and exploiting it to get root level enabled.  That seems insane to me.   Digging around I found some interesting takes on this whole rooting thing.

“…Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act rooting is illegal in the United States except by exemption. The U.S. Copyright Office currently grants phones an exemption to this law “at least through 2015″…”
–Wikipedia

What a shocker!  Consumers of hardware have limited access to what they own because these devices are capable of manipulating data that will result in the loss of intellectual property.  Crippleware is nothing new to me, I had seen it put in practice as a consequence of the MP3 format.  It was music sharing that changed everything and made dumbing down mainstream.

How about features that protect the consumer?  What happens if you loose your hardware?  On the surface smart phones aren’t that capable, resulting in the need to introduce new laws.

“…Those caught and convicted refer to it as apple picking, because it’s such low fruit and it’s so easy to do and we want to make sure that convenience is taken away.”…”
– San Francisco Gate Blog

What does this mean?  Bend the rules and take a chance if you want to make your phone do what you want it to.  If something goes wrong, you’re out of luck.  Otherwise, take it for face value and accept what it has been preprogrammed to do.

Adam Outler at XDA Developers made this instruction video on how to right a root app.