We asked, you told us: Your Android phone definitely isn't rooted

Many Android phones can be rooted, giving you a greater level of access to the device. This opens the door for greater customization, more system-level tweaks, and a host of other benefits.

We wanted to know how many Android Authority readers actually have a rooted phone, posting a poll about this topic on Monday (October 24). Now, the results are in, and here’s how you voted.

Is your Android smartphone rooted?

Results

We posted the poll earlier this week, specifically asking whether your daily driver was rooted, and over 3,300 votes were tallied. It turns out that a massive 77.4% of respondents said their phone wasn’t rooted.

Many of these voters noted in the comments that Android has matured to the point where rooting isn’t necessary for them. One reader also noted that they simply didn’t have time to tinker anymore.

Related: Everything you need to know about rooting your Android device

Meanwhile, 19.7% of surveyed readers said their phones were indeed rooted. Comments backing this choice pointed to benefits like ad-blocking, call recording software, custom ROMs, and improved backup support.

Finally, 2.9% of respondents said they simply weren’t sure whether their phone was rooted or not. We can understand this being the case if you’ve had your current daily driver for years now.

Comments

• roaduardo: I personally have no practical reason to root. Those days are way behind me, as fun as they were. Android today, IMHO, is very mature and basically all the things I rooted for in the past are here out of the box (and more). Also, security is way, way more important to me on my mobile devices. I don’t want to increase the risk of anything happening by unlocking and rooting.
• Stanley Kubrick: No need for many, many years now.
• HemanthJabalpuri: I rooted my realme C12 only because I want Call Recording feature through Basic Call Recorder(BCR) which needs to be made as a system app to function.
• Martin Pollard: Rooted and bootloader unlocked with a custom ROM.
• Skifarterking: Always have and always will root my phone. Backups and restores are much easier this way when switching phones, ADBlock works much better, really removing bloatware and nice tricks here and there.
• Craig Southwick: I voted no but I have a Pixel 6 not rooted and a Xiaomi POCO x3 rooted with a custom ROM. I used to install a custom ROM after about a year on everything. It was a good way to enhance your cheap and/or old phone. With a Pixel 6 I think I get all the features and performance I need. Rooting and ROMing is effort I don’t need to put in. It’s still fun though. Getting the POCO X3 to nearly Pixel like features and performance is a good feeling
• fd2blk78: It’s been YEARS!
• PhaserArray: It would be if I didn’t have to deal with getting SafetyNet to pass.
• Konrad Uroda-Darłak: I did it when I was young, now I have a job and a family so time is always too short. The need is also gone – Android has matured.
• Bolski: I haven’t rooted in years. For me, the Samsung phones (S7 and now S20 FE) are fine as is. With my S20 FE, I’m getting 1.5 days per charge and the performance is fine. Also, with better backups to the cloud now than when Android first came out, I no longer have to use Titanium Backup which required rooting when wanting to backup certain apps. So rooting for me is no longer something I require.