What is rooting?
Android is built on top of Linux Kernel. In Unix based machines such as Linux, we see two types of user accounts – regular user accounts and root accounts.
Regular user accounts usually have low privileges and they require permissions from root to execute privileged operations such as installing tools, making changes to the Operating System, and so on. But root accounts have all the privileges and permissions like applying updates, installing software tools, ability to run any command, and so on. Actually, this account has the ability to control the whole system. This privilege division model is one of the core Linux security features.
If you bought a new Android device, in fact, you are not the owner of the device, which means that you will have limited control over the device in terms of performing privileged operations that are possible for root accounts. So obtaining full control over the device by obtaining root access is termed as rooting.
The easiest way to check if you have the super user access on your device is by running the “su” command on an adb shell. The Unix command “su”, sometimes described as substitute user, super user, or switch user, is used by a computer user to execute commands with the privileges of another user account.
