Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I was going to do an image of my phone without using Root and voiding the warranty, but things have changed, and I want to go into why. Let’s get started!
Modern Smartphones are essentially pocket computers powerful enough to run a program pretending to be a state-of-the-art desktop from around 15-20 years ago. It used to be you had full access to everything when you tethered a device to a Desktop. I used that once to backup my first ever tablet and restore it after some work. Much to the annoyance of more than a few power users, around 7-10 years ago, it became standard practice to lock end-users out of the admin level actions under pain of voiding the warranty or even breaking the law, depending on the device and year.
I sort of understand the reasoning, but I wouldn’t mind a future where I cannot have warranty work done when anything I’ve ever done on the software side of would logically have had no affect on the intended work: for example, if I crack a screen (I tend to end up with the no-ask warranty policy), they would be well within their rights to take it in, plug in their diagnostic equipment, and leisurely return my phone if it tells them it’s ever been rooted.
I’ve had my Galaxy S7 Edge for a while now, and shortly after I got it, it developed a narrow, pink stripe down the right side of the screen. From my experiences and research back then, between a third and half of similar phones have this defect. As I understand it, the warranty was written in a way that encouraged you to keep the phone for a while before doing anything, so it’s been a couple years. This week, I decided I had had enough.
As a side note, since I’ve gotten my tablet, I haven’t been playing games on my phone as much. The one I’m still playing, though, recently got an update, where they started up what look like weekly events with grand prizes if you complete enough challenges. The first event, I played that event a lot. I put more time than I think was reasonable, and I still only got half way up the progressively longer ranks, just short of most of the prizes that are actually worth it. Of course, I could always spend the special currency linked to real money, but that trickles in way too slowly for normal gameplay, and I have zero cash for f2p games, lest I open Pandora’s box. In short, I lost interest because I felt cheated by a disguised pay to win system.
A couple weeks ago, that game would have been enough to give me the drive to make an image of my phone. According to my research, it would have taken a Desktop debugger and some other low-level commands, but there does not seem to exist a currently maintained GUI for what I wanted to do. Now? Now I’ll be happy just grabbing what I can and abandoning my game files hidden behind a wall of admin access.
Final Question: What laws about technology would you change if you had the opportunity?