Quest for a Rootless Experience

I've been rooted since the early days of my Nexus 4. It's just been a way of life for me. Why change it? Well, I got to wondering. Maybe all the things I'm doing to my phone don't really need to be done. Do you know how many bugs, crashes, and headaches have resulted from my tinkering? A lot. And now that I've had the opportunity to start fresh again thanks to my new Nexus 6P, I'm going to try the stock route. No root. No ROMs. Locked bootloader. But how will I survive without the root apps I've come to love?

First issue was battery life. I used apps like Greenify to help my battery in previous phones, but thankfully, Marshmallow already has me covered there. Although Greenify does indeed make Marshmallow's Doze feature better, you don't need root to use it! (You can find my post about that here.) Doze and app standby introduced in Marshmallow do many of the things root apps tried to do in Lollipop.

Second, I missed some features from my custom ROM days. Namely, the ability to skip tracks using the volume keys while the display is off. This is super handy when I'm driving or when I don't want to pull it out of my pocket just to change the song. I spent all day looking for solutions. There were many solutions for rooted devices, for sure. Many threads ending with "just flash a custom ROM!" Thank God for app developers, because as they say, there's an app for that. The app Pocket Skip Track does exactly what I was looking for. Sure, it requires root to have the "hold-down" method of changing songs, but you can still activate it with a single press or double press, which is good enough for me.

As for customization? Marshmallow has more of that than ever before. Sure, there are still a bunch of things you can't customize without root, but there sure is a lot you can do. If you hold down the settings icon under your quick settings, you'll see it begins to spin. Hold it down long enough and you'll unlock the "secret" System UI Tuner. This allows you to rearrange your quick settings, show a battery percentage, and disable status bar icons. Features included in many custom ROMs. That and a nice launcher like Nova is good enough for me.

Lastly, Tasker. I wrongly placed Tasker in my best root apps list. There are some functions that require root, but most of them don't. I honestly never knew this until after I tried to use it rootless. Many of my profiles could just be transferred over! No worries. Awesome profiles like having my phone go silent at school, automatically connect to bluetooth, enable auto-rotate in certain apps, and go silent when face down make Tasker one of the most powerful non-root apps. Period.

Point is, there's a lot you can do without root that you wouldn't expect. It just takes a little more work. Whether I'll stay on the rootless side depends. There are many things you can't achieve without root. Many things to miss out on. But I'll try to stick with it, if only to prove a point.