Rooting and modding a Windows Phone is now child's play Making DIY custom ROMs for your Windows Phone has just become ridiculously easy. A developer known as "Heathcliff74" - and we have reason to believe this is not his birth name - has released version 1.0 of Windows Internals - adding a easy-as-child's-play UI to the hairy business of unlocking and rooting a Windows Phone or …
That seems like such a stupid idea. What possible reason would you have for wanting to use a Windows phone to run Android? It isn't as though Windows phones offer some unique form factor. You might as well say you want to run Android on an iPhone 6S, that would be an equally useless endeavor.
As a percentage of Android phones, how many have been been rooted and modded by their owners?
3% have a particular custom firmware [0]. I guess there will be more that are rooted, since it is less invasive.
[0] Cyanogen has “more users than Windows Mobile and Blackberry combined”
Well there's the Wileyfox phones
I'm right on the verge of buying the Storm, but looking about for reviews by actual owners, seems to indicate product quality issues - lots of faulty handsets. Any Commentards got one? If so, marks out of 10 pls?
My current Lumia920 is childs play to repair, and has been generally reliable over the past 3 years, but it's time for a new phone and (I'm genuinely not trolling here) Android seems to be most of the market, so if I'm going to jump ship from WinPhone, that seems like the OS to go for.
Irritates the hell out of me, my phone company has made my phone impossible to root, meaning I'm stuck with the crapware they and the manufacturer have foisted on me (thanks Samsung). I've tried every available route and none have succeeded, even bricking the device a couple of times, fortunately not permanently. WTF is the problem, I use your service, I pay the bill, I bought the phone just let me do what I want with it.
If it's not permanent then it's not bricked. Bricked means permanently broken.
Upvoted because that is the common parlance ... but what if we were talking about an unfired clay brick? Leaving that in a bucket of water overnight would turn it back to soft clay and make it no longer a brick.
Note that I do NOT recommend this treatment for a phone ... not even a Windows phone.
It's perhaps down to the (sensible) idea that any connected handset be able to make emergency calls.
If unregulated handset modification by amateurs becomes the norm then the chances of picking up a phone and being confident of successfully placing an emergency call diminishes.
If unregulated handset modification by amateurs becomes the norm then the chances of picking up a phone and being confident of successfully placing an emergency call diminishes.
Sure. By perhaps 0.0001%. The primary purpose of modding is not to remove features like emergency calling, and the changes made by modders are unlikely to affect that particular function.
"Can you imagine anyone buying a computer if the manufacturer locked the administrator/root account?"
Like early UEFI you mean???
Or Region locked DVD, or DRM.
The manufacturers are replete with instances of trying to prohibit your control over things you purchase off them, that’s why ANYTHING I can do to release those locks I will do so. Consoles, chipped, Phones, rooted, PC, clocked, etc. etc.. In fact I will often buy things WITH restrictions so I can have the opportunity to unlock them as a "fuck you" to the company trying to restrict what I do with devices I have bought and own!!
I've not seen a rooted win phone yet of the 10 handsets in the wild I have seen have fallen in one of the two following categories:
1) new
2) bug filled and useless (usually after 6 months of use)
I know small sample size, but its difficult to find someone willing to use one twice.
I've seen two in the wild - my friend and his wife bought one each (over my reasoned objections), mainly because of the cameras. A year later, both were so heartily pissed off with hanging, random reboots, and ability to do basic tasks (making calls and texts) and receiving emails that they went to iPhones (and so far, they *have* just worked).
(and so far, they *have* just worked).
-- a bit like both Windows phones I've had, then. I bought them, as many do, for the wonderful camera, and have yet to be disappointed. If their phones hung or rebooted randomly, there was a problem with them - or maybe your post.
The next update I'm planning on my Windows phone is to strap it to a nice big chunk of wood and cut it in half with a circular saw. Then I'll take it into CarWarePhoneHouse and see if they'll send it back to the manufacturers for fault investigation.
With any luck they'll tell me they're not replacing it.
Whilst I welcome this new ability to mod my phone from it's original purpose, to what end I wonder will this improve my device. As far as I know MS keeps all of it's devices up to date with the latest version of Windows software and I can think of no function I need to perform as root. Indeed to do this to a device that previously passed the pwn to own test (http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/windows-phone-security-sandbox-survives-pwn2own-unscathed/) because of it's security and sandboxing seems rather irrational to me. But as someone else pointed out some people just want to play with their *cough* devices - who am I to judge them? :)
I quite like the idea.
In particular, I'm interested in it from the security point of view. While WP/M/Whatever is closed source, the baseband is available and so is the "BIOS" layer meaning it should be possible to interpose something that acts like the Blackphone firmware and treats the baseband as a hostile router.
This has obvious benefits in terms of security.
Unless you know something I don't, the pwn2own comp is aimed at attempting to breach the device from the perspective of a remote attacker? The software tool connects to the phone using a USB cable to take advantage of http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/how-to/wp7/basics/how-do-i-update-my-phone-software (basically the USB update mechanism). So the only way to breach the security or sandboxing is to purposely connect it to your computer and replace all that security with your own. So no built in security has been breached because it's using an update mechanism already provided to bypass the security for legit updating purposes?
So you allow people to bring their own devices*, and then sack them for treating their own devices as their own?
* And by "allow people to bring their own devices", I of course mean "force people to use their own devices for company work because your company is too cheap to provide them with resources adequate to the work it requires of them."
COPE - sure
BYOD - you have no rights, you may just cut their access off. Anyway, I have no idea why people would subsidize the business IT, creating a precedence in the process that one day may force them to do so.
BTW, if rooting WP rendered results as stable as W10 with any sort of privacy mods, you may just give up and prep for "restore to factory settings" (W10 is really touchy when it comes to taming the Metro interface). Having Bing disabled would be the 1st thing I'd do.
No but seriously. If you buy a phone, than it is your right to do whatever you like. I have windows phone lumia 535 with win10mobile insider preview, and have pre installed several applications. Some of Microsoft applications are not used by me, and it it is a waste of precious space. They are also running in the background, so instead that my processor, network bandwidth and battery is less consumed, it is constantly running in the background for the apps that I never use. This also apply to Android, iOS and rest. People should make a pressure for a companies to start releasing phones completely unlocked and without any restrictions. Or at least make the possibility to "unlock it". If I for some reason screw the phone, I void a warranty, and phone will not be repaired. I would be forced to buy another one, so this is a win-win situation.
ROM development is very patchy in the Android world. Just because you have an Android phone doesn't mean it's rootable.
This is due to the proliferation of phones (ie not just those available on the UK high street), obstinate manufacturers (cough Huawei) who don't release the necessary information, a lack of developers with access to the hardware, and short phone lives (partly due to built in batteries).
These days, if you want to go down this road, its best to get a phone that has already been cracked/customised, or know that the manufacturer will make it easier for custom development.
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