New to Android...and I've just discovered my phone is rooted!

Phate

Phate

Phate

Caporegime
Joined
1 Nov 2003
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Lisbon, Portugal
Hey all,

I'm very new to Android and have had my Nexus 5 a couple of weeks now. So far so good and the phone is being brilliant.

I bought the phone second hand from eBay. The only real change I've made to it is changing the runtime to 'ART' after a suggestion/recommendation from a friend to do this I had to enable Developer Options.

Would this have 'rooted' the phone? The only reason I discovered this was because I went to add my work email and they detected it was rooted and got an angry phone call wanted to know what I was up to :p

If not, I don't mind having a rooted phone, from what I can gather it basically gives you full admin rights across the entire device. I just want to make sure if the seller did this he isn't looking into everything I do on the phone? Call me paranoid but I'd like to make sure :)
 
Switching the ART would not have rooted the phone, the seller must have left it rooted.
 
tom_e said:
Switching the ART would not have rooted the phone, the seller must have left it rooted.
Click to expand...

Ah ok, that's what I wanted to confirm.

In that case, whats the best way to confirm he didn't leave anything dodgy on there? :D
 
Phate said:
Would this have 'rooted' the phone? The only reason I discovered this was because I went to add my work email and they detected it was rooted and got an angry phone call wanted to know what I was up to :p
Click to expand...

Is it a personal phone? If so what's it got to do with them?

Personally I'd be a bit paranoid and I'd want to wipe it. Far too much sensitive information that goes through my phone. Bit of a security risk if it's come from someone else.
 
Egon said:
Is it a personal phone? If so what's it got to do with them?

Personally I'd be a bit paranoid and I'd want to wipe it. Far too much sensitive information that goes through my phone. Bit of a security risk if it's come from someone else.
Click to expand...

Yes it's a personal phone. It's our companies security policy, we use 'GOOD' to allow us to message on personal devices, and it flagged up that a rooted phone had access to the network. So they were concerned!

Ok will back up photos and wipe it tonight. Thanks all :)
 
Grab the latest stock Nexus 5 firmware from here (and use something like 7-Zip to extract the tgz file) and run flash-all.bat in the folder, this will flash a clean copy of Android: https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

A factory reset may not remove root as the root stuff is in the system files which is usually untouched with the default factory reset.

You can leave the bootloader unlocked if you feel like going down the custom ROM route later.
 
Orcvader said:
Grab the latest stock Nexus 5 firmware from here (and use something like 7-Zip to extract the tgz file) and run flash-all.bat in the folder, this will flash a clean copy of Android: https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

A factory reset may not remove root as the root stuff is in the system files which is usually untouched with the default factory reset.

You can leave the bootloader unlocked if you feel like going down the custom ROM route later.
Click to expand...


You'll need the ADB drivers installed too, see here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2588979
 
Phate said:
Ah ok, that's what I wanted to confirm.

In that case, whats the best way to confirm he didn't leave anything dodgy on there? :D
Click to expand...

Just to say my s4 bought new off Amazon and not rooted gets detected by sky as rooted but my old root checking apps correctly say I'm not rooted.
 
Yeah, SuperSU basically manages requests for root and grants or deny's them. Think of it like UAC popping up on a windows machine in simple terms.

The phone does seem to be rooted, which isn't a bad thing in itself - but for piece of mind I'd wipe it personally.

When powering on the device, under the Google logo at the bottom of the screen should be a padlock, if the padlock is 'unlocked' this shows that the bootloader (think BIOS in very simple terms) is unlocked and will allow custom roms/rooting etc etc.
 
Phate said:
Its got the SuperSU app which I'm told is from Rooting?
Click to expand...

Yup, and since it installs itself to the system partition for root to work a normal factory reset will not remove it. Do the steps I suggested above and that will flash a clean copy of Android on your phone without any of the root stuff.
 
Orcvader said:
Yup, and since it installs itself to the system partition for root to work a normal factory reset will not remove it. Do the steps I suggested above and that will flash a clean copy of Android on your phone without any of the root stuff.
Click to expand...

Brilliant, thanks :)

Expect questions later :o
 
The seller really should have restored it completely to stock tbh, unless mentioned.

I always completely wipe mine and relock the bootloader too, although on Nexus devices the last part doesn't really make a difference.
 
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