Over the last few days, we have introduced you to what rooting is, a glossary of words that you need to be familiar with and things that you should keep in mind during the rooting process. Today, we will help you in finding the right sources and guides for rooting your Android device. 

The first thing that you should absolutely keep in mind is that there are tons of rooting guides out there for a particular device. A simple Google search for “Root Nexus 5” yields nearly 8,72,00,000 results. Sadly, not of all them are going to be accurate or helpful. Therefore, I will highly recommend our readers to read and follow multiple rooting guides for their devices.

Finding the right guide

Usually, you can find the best way to root you Android device over at XDA Developers forum. There is almost always an up-to-date, in-depth rooting guide accompanied with videos posted by a helpful member there in nearly every device sub-forum. The problem is finding the guide can be a very challenging task because of the volume of posts and so many buzz words floating around on the forums. However, if you can use the Search function properly, the probability of finding the right guide multiplies.

If you cannot though, try following the rooting guides on websites like The Unlockr, Android Central and your very own, Android Beat. Sadly, you will only find the rooting guides of major and popular Android devices or for particular variants there.

As always, Google can also be of help here. Searching for “Root” followed by your device name and its model number will probably yield a good number of results. Pick up at least two or three guides, read and follow them and you should do just fine.

Sometimes it’s not worth it

It might sound surprising to a lot of people, but sometimes rooting an Android device is simply not worth the effort and hassle. There are mainly two reasons behind this: an extremely complicated rooting process for a particular device and the trade-off associated with rooting.

Rooting some of the heavily locked-down carrier-branded Android devices, that are generally sold in the United States, can be a very tedious experience and is not at all recommended for newbie users. For example, the recently released T-Mobile Xperia Z1s comes with a locked bootloader. This makes gaining root access on the device particularly tough and requires users to first downgrade to an older firmware, root that and then upgrade to the latest one. It is probably much easier to return the phone for another one or just give up on the idea of rooting the device altogether.

On some other Sony devices, unlocking and rooting the phone will delete certain DRM files that are required for features like Mobile Bravia Engine 2 to work properly. Even on Samsung devices, gaining root access trips a hardware counter which not only voids your warranty permanently but also disables Knox — a feature that might be required by Enterprise users.

Which is your go-to site when it comes to rooting guides? How do you think we can improve our guides? Drop in a comment and let us know!