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Home Knowledgebase General KB The Basics

The Basics
This is where your journey of understanding the basics begin. We try to answer
questions such as whats a system app? or whats a shell?. You will need to
understand these nomenclatures and information as it will be used throughout the rest
of the knowledgebase. Here is a summary of the chapters contained in this page:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

What is a system app?

What is a user app?
What is system data?
What is root/rooting?
What about the Android security model?
Why isnt my phone rooted out of the box?
What do NAND locked and S-ON mean?
Everyone talks about opening a shell so how do I do that?

1. What is a system app ?

A system app is an application that resides in /system/app/ and thus is technically a
part of your ROM.

2. What is a user app ?

A user app is an application that resides either on the /data partition of your phones
internal memory or on your SD card.

3. What is system data ?

In the vast majority of cases, system data is simply the data that belongs to system

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apps or services. For example your SMS/MMS are system data that belong to the
Dialer Storage system service. There are some special elements (such as the Wi-Fi
access points list) that dont belong to a specific system element, but they must be
considered as exceptions.

4. What is root/rooting ?
root is the UNIX system administrator.
Rooting an Android phone means modifying your ROM (or installing a 3rd-party
custom ROM) so that you can grant root privileges to certain programs.
In our case, Titanium Backup uses these privileges to backup other applications
data, regardless of security restrictions. Without root privileges this would be
impossible to do (see the Android security model point below).

5. What about the Android security model ?

Under the Android security model, every app can access its own data, plus some
of the general phones data (eg: SMS/MMS, Contacts) if it has the necessary
permissions. Apps may also share their data with other apps, but they are (of
course) not forced to do so.
While some apps have a way of backing up/restoring their own data (which
resides inside the phones memory) to your SD card or to the cloud, and some
apps offer a way of sharing their data, the vast majority of apps do not have any
backup or data sharing features built-in. This is where Titanium Backup comes in.
Titanium Backup is not constrained by the Android security model so it can
potentially backup/restore all the data that is on your device.

6. Why isnt my phone rooted out of the box ?

Because of restrictions imposed by the manufacturer or perhaps by your carrier.
In its pure form, the Android OS itself is open-source and not limited.
Rooting gives you full access to your device, which gives you more power and
responsibilities which some novice users may not need nor want.

7. What do NAND locked and S-ON mean ?

A NAND locked (or S-ON) device is a device where the ROM (usually mounted
at /system) is write-protected in hardware and thus cannot be modified, even if
you have root privileges. Sometimes you get the illusion that you can write to
/system, but in any case all changes will disappear after a reboot. This is why
these devices often have temp root instead of permanent root.
In order to get permanent root access, you need to make your device NAND
unlocked (or S-OFF) first. In other words, you need to unlock the bootloader.

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8. Everyone talks about opening a shell so how

do I do that ?
A shell simply is a command line to type commands on your Android phone.
If youre comfortable with typing on the phone then you can just use the
ConnectBot (free) app or the Better Terminal (paid) app.
If you want (or need) to type commands from a computer, just install the Android
SDK, then enable USB debugging on your phone and finally, connect your
phone through USB and type adb shell on your computer.

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