Nexus 7 Rooting: why?

[1720a519]

In 4.2 they hid the developer options for some reason, go to the about phone screen in settings and tap the build number 7 times and it'll unlock the dev options.

Geesh. I could have spend years and never figured that out. Thank you!

 

[bigrash]

I rooted my past android devices, but I have no reason now to root my Nexus 7

 

[FeuerFrei]

In 4.2 they hid the developer options for some reason, go to the about phone screen in settings and tap the build number 7 times and it'll unlock the dev options.

What the ...
It worked. On my Nexus 7 I went to About tablet tapped the build number thrice and it popped up a notice saying "You are 4 steps away from becoming a developer" - then 3-2-1-*bam* after 7 taps it said "You are now a developer!" Then backed out to the main settings menu and there was the new Developer option.

Thanks for the tip.

 

[mrrman]

will check this out

 

[bonkers325]

to install CyanogenMod or one of it's many forks/variants. i do it for the battery %, custom screen brightness filters, volume rocker awake, and custom kernel.

 

[bonkers325]

1. Stickmount rocks. I loaded up a 10 GB mkv movie and it played fine, off a 32 GB NTFS flash drive. Well, actually there was a split second audio lag but I wonder if it's the Dice player. I couldn't install VLC because it isn't supported in my area.

2. I couldn't be bothered to jump through hoops to install Browser.apk, and Dolphin HD beta didn't work, so I installed Firefox Beta instead with Flash 11.1.111.5. It works very well, to my pleasant surprise. Strangely though if I installed the later 11.1.115.12, all the Flash content is all pixelated.

Dice player uses software decoding. try MXplayer which supports hardware decoding (plays 1080p Cast Away and 1080p Dark Knight just fine). you will need to use a custom ffmpeg to enable DTS, if your mkv is encoded with it.

 

[sjwaste]

Hmmm... the OP raises a valid point though. I thought the whole point of rooting was to do stuff you're locked out of doing on your device. And I thought the whole point of the Nexus line was bare Android with none of those restrictions. If you still have to root to do what you want, how is a Nexus device different from any other?

It's not restricted. Fastboot is enabled, so all you have to do is give it one command to unlock the bootloader. Then if you want to root, you boot an insecure recovery image and flash the SU binary. The reason it's not rooted out of the box is for security. You don't want to just run apps as root unless you have a specific reason to do it.

I suppose that Google could ship it with SU preloaded or available via a fastboot command.