What is root – Gary explains...

What is root – Gary explains

You may have heard of the term “rooting your phone” and you may have seen that some apps on the Google Play Store require “root” access to work. But what is root? What is “rooting” your phone and why would you do it? Let’s find out!

The majority of operating systems including Windows, OS X and Linux have the concept of system privileges where processes, and therefore users, run at different privilege levels which determine what the process is allowed or prohibited from doing. On some OSes this scale of system privileges is fine grained with a range of privileges from the lowest to the highest. On Unix-like operating systems the difference between an unprivileged user and a privileged user is more black and white. A process or user is either unprivileged, or privileged, with no ambiguity in between. A privileged user on Linux is known as a superuser or root.