What is "root" and i have a lot of question please help.

[borification]

First of all what is root?

is it the method for android like jailbreak for ios? if no then is there any method like jailbreak for android so i can download apps and games for free.

what is "APK"?

what do you mean by "cracking the apps"?

im new to android

your little explanations will help me understand the world of android.


THANKS IN ADVANCE

[catscan]

If your new to Android don't bother with Root, the beauty of Android is it's much like a PC everything is open & not locked down like the IOS. An APK is like a PC's exe file, it installs the app.
Here are 3 easy steps to installing cracked apps on Android.

1. Enable third-party apps, (How to video)
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-...ndroid-phones/

2. Download Airdroid.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...ure=nav_result

3. Download any of the apps/APK around the net & install.

[borification]

thanks catscan so i can also download the paid version of the games i want? what if i want the real racing 2 game? it should be bought in order to play it.

[gokul23]

use the search bar on the top right of this forum,u will find it

[tipsek]

@borification: you can find pretty much any game or app on this forum in the Android section. Usually you just download and install APK. Sometimes there are extra SD/OBB files that need o be downloaded and put in correct folders, but that is always explained in the topic.

As for ROOT it's kind of like Administrative access on your PC. With root, you can access some parts of the phone you normally couldn't/shouldn't, and some games/apps may require root access to work.

With root for example you can bypass some apps protection/remove ads (with LuckyPatcher), you can make awesome backups/removing anything/etc (with Titanium Backup), and so much more. My favorite thing you can do with root is going somewhere with public WIFI, and disconnecting Apple users. Yes, you can do that and they can't. (with WiFiKill).

Glad you jumped ship, once you get used to it, customize it and see just how much it can do you will love Android.

[borification]

thanks @tipsek. appreciate it a lot. one more thing what do you mean by cracking the apps? and what is OBB?

[shofi]

thanks @tipsek. appreciate it a lot. one more thing what do you mean by cracking the apps? and what is OBB?

Cracking :
Some app has protection to become automatically unusable if you don't purchase it from market cracking means remove those protection from app.
Obb :
Some games size are big so developer create small size apk later that apk download obb from external sources and together that games full functional. Actually apk include all codes and obb includes all media files..

[steptoe]

You don't really need to root your phone for everyday use, BUT if you want full control over your phone to install custom firmware/ROMS then you WILL need to root your phone

A lot of people use this (me included)

http://www.cyanogenmod.org/

Its not an illegal software, it uses freely available code from Google. The problem is with rooting is mobile phone companies don't like it, main problem is it WILL invalidate your warranty and you have done something to bypass the various protections on your phone that were put in place to protect your phone and also to protect people from themselves when/if they make a mistake and then try to say the phone is rubbish and want their money back


It also means you can upgrade your phone that may not have any more software updates available, so you can update a phone that isn't going to get anymore updates or the usual case is the mobile companies take months to issue an upgrade by which time their 'official' upgrade is out of date again

The developers of custom firmware try their best to make rooting your phone as simple as possible, BUT there is always a slight risk that you could brick your expensive phone (bricked means its about as much use as a brick). Usually installing custom firmware going wrong is down to the person installing it didn't follow the install instructions exactly as explained or didn't read it enough times to understand the instructions ... some can be a bit confusing and don't make a lot of sense but the end result works


Once rooted it opens your phone up to a lot more than before. So rooting your phone fully unlocks everything, but this can also lead to problems if you get something wrong or delete something by accident

Installing custom firmware can improve your phone (like upgrading to Android 4 on a phone that is never going to get it to force you to upgrade your phone so spending money you didn't really want to) as it removes a lot of the junk mobile companies include that is useless to most people and also add restrictions to the phone that rooting remove, and also means you can do very useful things like run almost all your apps from the external memory instead of the phones memory which runs out very fast if you play games or install a lot of apps. So it will stop the 'out of memory' error when installing apps or big games. This is one BIG plus about rooting


Game companies have been forced to have the data for their huge mobile games running from the SD card (otherwise you would just about be able to install one game and have no memory left and very unhappy people) and a very tiny APK that is installed on the phones memory. This then loads the game data as and when its needed, much like the old games available for computers like the Sinclair Spectrum/C64, Commodore Amiga (etc,etc) that had huge games but not enough memory to run them