What is Root? (android version of Jailbreak)

[guymarshall]

I want to root a note 5 that I am going to get to change clock speeds to save battery and many other reasons, are there any disadvantages of rooting my phone? What is root and how much does it let you do to the phone and is it safe?

Thanks.

 

[mazooni]

I want to root a note 5 that I am going to get to change clock speeds to save battery and many other reasons, are there any disadvantages of rooting my phone? What is root and how much does it let you do to the phone and is it safe?

Thanks.

I have not personally rooted my Note 5 but I have rooted my HTC One M8 and Galaxy S3. From what I have read if you root a Note 5 you lose the ability to use Samsung Pay (somebody please correct me if I am wrong at any point in my response), also if Samsung Knox detects root it will lock you out of your device and you will not be able to get back in (essentially bricking your phone). I am sure people have found ways around this but bottom line is rooting a Note 5 can be kind of risky if you do not know what you are doing.

 

[guymarshall]

I want to root a note 5 that I am going to get to change clock speeds to save battery and many other reasons, are there any disadvantages of rooting my phone? What is root and how much does it let you do to the phone and is it safe?

Thanks.

I have not personally rooted my Note 5 but I have rooted my HTC One M8 and Galaxy S3. From what I have read if you root a Note 5 you lose the ability to use Samsung Pay (somebody please correct me if I am wrong at any point in my response), also if Samsung Knox detects root it will lock you out of your device and you will not be able to get back in (essentially bricking your phone). I am sure people have found ways around this but bottom line is rooting a Note 5 can be kind of risky if you do not know what you are doing.

Thanks for the answer, sorry for the late reply. For the average user who doesn't really know much about how phones work, is it worth the risk or can I just use other techniques to increase performance (developer tools) and battery life (brightness + aeroplane mode)?

 

[mazooni]

I personally don't believe it is worth the risk of rooting a Note 5 unless you will be using root specific features such as custom roms and other stuff like that. The performance of the Note 5 is satisfactory for most users out of the box. For battery life lowering brightness helps a lot, also the power management settings built into the phone help quite a bit such as slowing down the cpu. Another tool I found in the google play store is an app called "Greenify" which closes all the background apps using memory which saves lots of battery and data (which is important if you don't have unlimited data and are not on wifi). An issue lots of people report with the Note 5 (as well as s6, s6 edge+) is the standby time. If you have wifi enabled during standby it drains battery for some reason. The solution for most people was just disabling wifi over night to save battery. Hopefully Samsung will come up with a solution very soon as android 6 gets rolled out this month for the Note 5.