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How does rooting "cripple" security? You still need to give Superuser permission to apps on an individual basis. So long as you only give Superuser permission to widely-used open-source apps, what's the "crippling" change?
Or do you mean having an unlocked bootloader, which gives anyone with physical access to your device tools to unlock your phone? That's related, but different, from rooting. And you can lock your bootloader and keep root access, so they aren't interchangeable.
you can't lock your bootloader and retain access for one. that's an easy way to brick your device. it cripples security because in order to gain this access you are patching in the sudo binary (which doesn't normally exist on Android and is therefore not designed to be securely used) and a bunch of selinux policies that give extremely vague permissions systemwide. data exfiltration is made a much simpler task when a user has rooted their device.
it is also increasing attack surface. you now have to trust that this per app permission model is actually functioning correctly and isn't exploitable.
edit: it is worth noting that having root access on a desktop Linux system is horribly insecure as well, though. I completely remove sudo on my systems (although considering one can just invoke
su -corsu - rootthat doesn't help too much in actuality)You have just proven you never or very rarely use a computer. How do you even update the system without sudo or an alternative to it?
Without root permissions you basically can't manage your system anymore.
one of the reasons I use nix package manager is because it doesn't require root. it has separate build users and a daemon responsible for privileged file management. I also have a separate user with access if I absolutely need it, or I can log in with a live session and chroot into my system.
if you need root for a general purpose application then it's badly designed
a better solution than giving blanket root access would be an API/daemon that provides more fine grained permission control, similar to how flatseal manages the flatpak sandbox.
edit: anyone wanna help me on a new project idea...?
su -is actually the traditional way of getting superuser permissions on a Linux device—enter your root password, and it gives you a root shell that can perform all administration tasks. I've never even hadsudoinstalled on my systems, because it doesn't improve security for my specific use case. (How relevant is this to the various Android-device-related points? Not at all, really.)