> Seriously, you never had to provide tech support to a parent, relative, or friend whose computer got totally fraked because they had root?

I accept this metric. It means non-rooted devices are unsafe.

I'm career IT support. In the entire age of smartphones, 100% of the malware/crapware I've seen was on non-rooted devices - most of it pushed on users by manufacturers, carriers and OS devs.

> I'm career IT support. In the entire age of smartphones, 100% of the malware/crapware I've seen was on non-rooted devices - most of it pushed on users by manufacturers, carriers and OS devs.

To add on, almost all the money people I know who have lost to scams have been through non-rooted devices. Sending an OTP or making a bank transfer because "you're under police investigation" is cheerfully easy even without the user knowing what "root" is.

Also see: the recent phish on Krebs (on security). A malicious email and entering a password to a webpage does not need root access, for better or worse. In fact, a rooted device might block your bank app, actually making money transfer scams tougher, ironically.

"I accept this metric. It means non-rooted devices are unsafe."

Same here. It's manufacturers and software vendors such as Google and Microsoft that we need to most guard against.

Fully agree wirh your second paragraph, I've only seen viruses on non-rooted devices and I've never had a virus on any of the many rooted phones I've owned over the years.

Sure there are viruses and they can be troublesome but when you look below the surface much of the hype about locking down one's devices comes from manufacturers and software vendors, Google, MS et al, who benefit financially from not allowing users to control what runs on their phones.

It's not only phones, what Microsoft has done with TPM and Windows 11 and the deliberate obsoleting of millions of perfectly good PCs/forcing users to buy new hardware when it's unwarranted is simply outrageous.

Microsoft ought to be sued for committing environmental vandalism. …And that's just for starters.