So I finally took the plunge and rooted my HTC Desire Z.

All the goodies – perm-root, S-OFF, engineering hboot, clockwork recovery – in addition to the SIM-unlock I already had.  Probably SuperCID as well.

You may be asking – why, oh why would you do such a thing?!?

Two reasons.

First –

Google recently p’d me off and made some unwelcome changes to two of their core products. Ever since v2.3.5, Gmail has had its database locked to other apps, meaning that things like my handy Missed Reminders app (no longer supported or available on the Market 😦 ) wouldn’t give me repeating alarms for unread Gmail email.  This meant reverting to the version of Gmail that came up on my phone, and suffice it to say that – although functional – I found myself missing some of the newer features.  To get around this, I visited a 3rd-party site to download v2.3.4 of Gmail, but I never felt comfortable running that binary from the untrusted source.

In the same vein, Google Maps post-v5.10 features useless traffic condition colours in Navigation.  I use this feature almost daily during my commutes, so again I went to a 3rd-party site to upgrade my stock version of Maps to 5.10.x.  Same concerns as above.

Rooting allowed me to do some interesting things with Gmail, where you take the official .apk and modify it to restore the database permissions that existed pre-v2.3.5.  So that’s cool.  It does mean that I have to do the same trick on each new version of Gmail that gets released, but at least I can keep up-to-date with an official (though modified) binary.

No solution yet for Google Maps, but this thread has me holding out hope that Google is aware they messed up and will issue a fix in the next release.

And on the subject of security, I figured it best to get ahead of the curve and root my phone myself rather than have some dastardly 3rd-party app do it stealthily without my knowledge.  With Superuser installed I get a notification whenever an app requests root access.

Second –

I’m running the stock Froyo 2.2 ROM that came with this phone.  I’m mostly okay with that, because so far I like the HTC customizations (although I’m using ADW Launcher vs. HTC’s Sense launcher) and I’m not pining for Gingerbread – I’ll most likely go straight to Ice Cream Sandwich some time after CM9 becomes available on the Z.  However, the stock ROM contains bloatware that I really wanted to do without.

Rooting allowed me to remove the bloatware (courtesy of Titanium Backup, although other adb-ish methods exist).  It also allowed me to add some additional functionality, like being able to power-on the screen by pressing the touchpad button vs. pressing the power button.

So that’s all well and good.  But does that alone make me an advanced Android user?

Not exactly, but having delved into adb and manually restoring my SMS history and various app prefs via the adb shell – yes, I think I’m more advanced than your average user, and probably half-way to being as advanced as the guys who wear a different ROM every day and like to flash radios.

A nice side-effect in this adventure is that my phone is running faster than before.  Same ROM, but I ended up having to wipe data and perform a factory reset after the root process left my phone in a constant boot-loop.  Blessing in disguise that was.  Hopefully it offsets the 5-hours-of-sleep price that I had to pay.