I have gone through the pros and cons of hacking the operating system in previous articles, so I will not discuss them again here, but suffice to say that both the software and the hardware have matured so nicely that the vast majority of people can be perfectly happy with their new smartphone or tablet as it comes out of the box. Android Nougat continues to enforce this boot check but aims to give users more than just a warning, according to a recent post by Google on its Android Developers blog. It helps in expanding notifications and taking required action quickly and easily. It does, but to a limited subset of these modifications for a number of devices. Most rooted devices need to have their bootloaders unlocked for the root to remain permanent, so this shouldn’t be an issue for most custom ROM users. This was all behind the scenes until Android 6.0 Marshmallow-that’s when Google started alerting users to system integrity.
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Among other things, rooting affects the boot image.
The additional security measure known as Verified Boot would be very much welcome, especially with so many types of malware floating around, including the recently reported new version of the Android.Fakebank.B app. The malware automatically cancels outgoing calls to customer service call centers of banks, which are presumably being made to report and cancel unauthorized transactions. There are some devices where the bootloader can’t be unlocked, but it may still be possible to root. A Nexus Android Wear device will not offer a different stock user interface as they all already use this. They are still in beta mode but we can clearly see what Google and Apple are up to for their next big OS. It is so simple that everyone can do it with a little bit of patience and time to spare. Even as enhancements are made to the former to be at par with Apple’s latest operating system, changes to these two entities are made independent of each other as far as Android is concerned.
Even a single-byte error could prevent the phone from booting.
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If a portion of the phone’s data is corrupt, Android will launch in limited-use mode or it won’t boot at all. It is able to recover from the loss of an entire block of data on the filesystem, using error correction features to intelligently fix corrupt regions.
