The 6 Best Apps to Install on Your Rooted Android Device

You’ve rooted your Android device and are now feeling pretty good about yourself. But after the initial thrill of overcoming the obstacle of rooting subsides, you may be left wondering “What next?” Aside from installing a swanky new custom ROM on your device (which you should do first if you plan on doing it at all), you can now use many, many powerful apps that only really shine on rooted devices. These are our top picks.

Note: it goes without saying that you need a rooted device for these apps to work properly.

1. Link2SD

Android may have a built-in “Move to SD” function for your apps, but that’s very limited, and if you have big games (kept as “obb” files) on your device, then the bulk of them will still stay on your phone. Link2SD moves these “obb” files to your SD card while creating a shortcut at their original destination. Your Android phone still thinks they’re in internal storage, when in reality they’re on your SD card and saving space.

You need to create a second partition on your SD card for this to work, but it’s a real game-changer (pun intended).

2. Titanium Backup

Google’s built-in backup options for your phone are fine, but Titanium Backup takes things to another level. It’s capable of backing up and restoring and freezing all your apps, with the very in-app settings you had before creating the backup. All your backed up data is encrypted and can be sent to external devices or cloud services including Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. You can also set backups to be created at set times or do them manually.

Titanium has built a great reputation over the years turning the tedious, comprehensive process of backups into a cinch.

3. SetCPU

If you’re technologically literate and feel confident about tweaking the voltage of your CPU on your Android device, then you can do so using SetCPU. Why would you want to do this? Maybe you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of performance to get longer battery life or vice versa. Or perhaps you want to create a CPU profile specifically for gaming so tbat those 3D games running on your QHD smartphone display run as smoothly as possible.

Whatever your reasons, SetCPU is the kind of techy app that makes rooting worthwhile.

4. Greenify

Greenify has been around for a while, but its developers continue to regularly update it to keep its battery-saving goodness optimised and relevant to modern devices. Its main purpose is as a background app manager in that it tells you which apps are running in the background and which ones wake up your PC most often.

Once you’ve found the battery-hogging culprits, you can hibernate them, which means that they’ll use up less RAM and battery while running in the background. They may take a little longer to open each time as a result, but the trade-off will be worth it for those who prioritize battery life.

5. Liveboot

This one’s for more techy users or simply those who want to see the countless complex processes that occur when you boot up your Android device. Similar to what booting up a PC in the early 90s looked like, Liveboot displays all the logcat and dmesg information on your Android device as its booting up, presenting you with a multi-colored wall of scrolling text as you boot up.

You can tweak how much information it displays and can also make it transparent so that you see all the text over your standard Android boot screen. (Personally, I prefer the old-school black background.)

6. Root Explorer

Root Explorer does what its name says. It lets you explore the root level files on your Android device that can’t normally be explored using the default file manager app on your device. This way you can view, modify, and even delete the files that are part of your phone software, though be careful while doing so, as it may lead to the bricking of your device. Besides giving you access to root files, the app does a number of other tasks as well.

You can get the app for $3.99 from the Google Play Store.