Android phone rooting

Yesterday I rooted my phone (an OG Droid) and put Cyanogen mod on it.  After a couple of recommended settings tweaks, it's running much better than it was on the stock ROM, and the battery life looks to be much improved.  All told, I'm happy with the results, but not so much with the process of getting there.  The steps I needed the take - that is, the ones which were necessary to root the phone and load the ROM - were not bad.  The number of steps I actually took, however, was far greater, and the overall process chewed up a significant amount of my Sunday afternoon. 

"Back in the day", when rooting and custom ROMs were a new thing, the processes were not well documented, and there was always some risk that you would brick your phone.  Nowadays, however, writers all over the 'net, on legitimate sites no less, proclaim how much easier it is to soup up your Android phone.   When I read such claims, I assumed it meant that the Android community was akin to the modern day Linux community, which has made it easier than ever before for new users to install both the OS and new software.

Not so.  There are lots of places instructing you on how to root your phone or load a ROM, but no one is on the same page.  Everyone has a different approach, and at first glance it isn't easy to understand why (or which one you should adopt for your own purposes).  Look a little closer at the dates when all these instructions were posted, however, and you'll begin to understand the problem.  Most of them are old, and are likely made obsolete by newer, better methods.  Unfortunately, if you're dealing with an old phone, you're not going to find any very recent guides, so you have to weed through archived forum posts and figure out which ones are "current".

The other problem I noticed is a lack of explanation.  On one hand, you have guides which try to be user friendly by eliminating any sort of explanation of what is going on.  They simply tell you do run some tools and poof! - your phone is ready.  This is dangerous and potentially costly, and I wonder if these friendly guides harm more than they help.

On the other hand, however, the more technically minded authors are reminiscent of the Linux community from years ago, which would scream "RTFM" to people who didn't know where the manual even was (and there was a good chance that it wasn't easy to find).  Many forum based guides scold any would be rooters who fail to understand the process, or the purpose of all the software they need to use. I can understand that you want the reader to have this knowledge in hand, but why not give it to them then?  If you tell them to go google it instead, they're likely to go find another, better guide in the process.  Imagine if you were a teacher who gave instruction but, never assigned any work to complete, and never specified any texts to read.  Then you decided to fail a students who didn't find the materials on their own, and so was unprepared for the day's lecture.  That's what it felt like when I read some of these posts.  If you tell someone to use the Android SDK, would it be hard to actually say "this is part of the Android SDK, and here's why you need it." And if you aren't good at writing, surely someone else in the community is!

Lastly, I have an issue with how some Android fan sites use people's interest in rooting for their own gain.  Many of the forum based guides are unuseable without registering for the site.  Links are blocked, downloads are disallowed, etc. I don't like having to register for a site that I only plan on visiting once, and it's even more insulting when the site in question has a "rooting" sub section which is linked to on the front page.  Way to rope 'em in.

When all is said and done, I understand that this section of the Android community is built on volunteer work, and I am very thankful for their efforts.  It's just frustrating, as a nerd, to see worst nerd tendencies manifest themselves again and again.  It doesn't have to be this way.

And if you're wondering why I don't go and volunteer my own time and knowledge, consider this - on the XDA developers forum, one of the subforums has a "no newbies allowed" warning, and as far as I can tell, there's no alternative newbie zone to start out in. Behold the power of open source gone wrong - everyone is free to participate, unless you aren't bright enough to figure everything out on your own, or lack the effort to wade through problems which were already solved.