Why NOT to root your android smartphone

Yes, it sounds a bit unorthodox. But I wanna point out that I am not discouraging you playing around with your phone's features. Yes, it unlocks a ton of features. But with great power comes great responsibilities.

Whenever someone asks me to help them root their phone, I first ask them why specifically then want to root their phones. If I don't get a convincing answer, I don't help them and advise them not to do it.

Because rooting phone exposes phone to a lot of security risks that weren't previously there. I want to talk about one specific one that I have personal experience with.

So, recently I had my phone rooted, pretty standard procedure. Nothing out of the ordinary. I also installed a terminal emulator from the app store. I liked to browse around the filesystem in my phone. Looking at directories and comparing them with my laptop's Linux machine. And then I saw this line of command somewhere in the internet.

rm -rf /

Yeah, it looks bad. I got curious whether it would actually work on my phone. I knew I hadn't used sudo command so I guessed SuperUser would prompt me to deny/grant access to the command usage. But here I forgot that I had already authorized my Terminal app to root access. Still, how can a command that self-destructs work right? Well, it did work. Although, not completely.

So as I typed the self-destruct command on the terminal and hit enter. It did nothing, at first. It just accepted the command but didn't show any progress or anything such. Thinking it didn't work, I closed the terminal app and went back to my other tasks, browsing social media and such. I locked my phone and put it in my pocket and had forgotten about it for around 2-3 hours. Then I took my phone out and tried to open something, the phone froze. It happened sometimes because my phone is pretty mid-range phone so I decided to restart it by taking out the battery and putting it back in. It restarted successfully, No issues found. But when I opened the Gallery app, it showed empty! I panicked and checked ES File Explorer. Still empty. I restarted my phone again and checked, empty again. All my personal files, photos, videos, music files had gone.

I realised the command did execute, but as a background process. It had begun removing files one-by-one inside the / directory. It did not delete everything just inside the /mnt and /media directories where all the multimedia files were residing. It did not even touch the application data files, which reside on the same directory as multimedia files. I am guessing the root user did not have access to these direcotries as they belonged to respective apps. So it deleted the files it had access to, except for system directories. It was like formatting my phone except for all the apps in there. 

So, I recommend not rooting your phone. Even if you do, do not be stupid like me and try unsafe commands.