>This is not what people are referring to when they talk about rooting on Android

Would this have been easier or more possible if Android had a full capability-based security model?

Arguably Android has a capability-based security model, though it suffers from being ... well, it's not what you'd build if you were doing it from scratch today. Hindsight is 20/20. But I'd tentatively say not really, because the point of root is to get outside the existing capabilities. As an example: For a while, the most common root app I ran was one to limit charging to 80% or whatever to make the battery age more gracefully.[0] The whole reason that needed root is because there wasn't a capability/permission for that; the app couldn't ask the OS to let it control charging, because nobody even thought to expose that API surface.

[0] This was later obsoleted by the OS adding that feature natively, which is an interesting angle to consider; directly supporting the things people root for definitely helps, but you're unlikely to ever get everything so it's not a panacea.

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ysnp 3 days ago | parent [-]

>This was later obsoleted by the OS adding that feature natively, which is an interesting angle to consider; directly supporting the things people root for definitely helps, but you're unlikely to ever get everything so it's not a panacea.

For what it's worth, my understanding is that this has always been the position of GrapheneOS too. Given the resources and enough benefit/cost to allocate, the project would rather integrate or implement usability features at the OS level instead of encouraging people to expose attack surface. Specifically because GrapheneOS is a project meant to be primed to defend some of the most intimate and personal aspects of a person's life.

	▲	yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I definitely think it's an excellent goal to erode the cases that need root. It is a powerful escape hatch, and I think it's important that it exist, but it's also a good thing to not need it. The difference is that I don't believe the system will ever cover everything I want to do, so I consider that escape hatch to be really important.