Back in the golden days of Android, rooting your phone was an absolute must – according to tech enthusiasts.

You could block ads with AdAway, adjust kernel parameters/system performance with your favorite kernel tweaking tool, hibernate system processes with Greenify, force doze mode on Naptime or customize the system UI on AOSP ROMs with Substratum.

Rooting your phone was the only way you could take control of your phone and make it look or behave the way you want it to.

Starting with Android 5.0, Google made great strides in bringing a more cohesive look to Android. Before then, iOS remained the champion in design.

Material Design was the first time Android had a modern design and a clear vision. Android finally looked good.

Before Lollipop, Google’s Android was in need of visual refresh. Compared to iOS 7’s flat, bokeh-inspired design, Android was ugly.

When Google released Android 4.0 in 2011, the Holo interface was lauded as the best redesign Google had made for Android.

Compared to previous releases, the Holo interface was a huge step up from Gingerbread’s design.

Holo gave Android more of a Tron-esque look.

And that was OK considering Android was still innovating in design and performance.

Holo was considered “good-enough” for the time.

After Ice Cream Sandwich, Google focused on optimizing system performance with Project Butter in 2012. Android was a lagging, stuttering mess before and Google acknowledged this.

Project Butter was meant to optimize the UI to be just as fluid as iOS.

Previously, to achieve similar results, tech enthusiasts who rooted their phones would edit the build.prop files or flash zips to speed up their OS to meet the performance and fluidity of Project Butter.

In subsequent releases following Lollipop, Google further optimized the OS to be smoother, and use less battery in Doze mode.

Now we have an operating system that was fast, had a great design, and used less battery.

There was still a need to root your phone.

While Doze mode, introduced in Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), put your phone in a deep sleep mode, the device had to be on a flat surface and couldn’t be touched for an hour in order for the system to enter Doze mode.

With apps such as Greenify or Naptime, you could grant root privilege to enable aggressive Doze.

Instead of waiting for your device to enter Doze, you could force it to enable Doze mode in minutes.

And if you wanted your phone to Doze while it’s in motion, you could enter Doze-on-the-Go. This option put your phone in a deep sleep while it was in your pocket.

Battery saving options, largely, remain the same with Android 8.0.

So, should you root your phone?

Probably not. Most phones come with locked bootloaders. Without an unlocked bootloader, you can’t flash a custom recovery to flash a Su binary (or a systemless option such as Magisk) to achieve root.

You can use a non-root option, such as DNS66 or Adguard, for ad blocking.

You can type in adb commands (here and here) in the terminal to enable aggressive Doze mode in the Greenify/Naptime app.

And the same goes for typing specific adb commands to get App Ops (manager to get App Ops to work without root here) to work on phones without root.

What about theming?

You can use Sony’s OMS (Overlay Manager Service) and the upcoming Substratum build to theme Oreo without root. You only need to use the desktop tool the creators of the app have provided to grant the app elevated privileges to work.

All in all, you can avoid rooting your phone as long as you have some technical know-how.

If you want the settings to be persistent, root is the way to go.

The only difference between a rooted phone and a non-rooted phone is if you reboot your non-rooted phone, you have to re-enter the adb commands required for the apps above to enable advance settings/customization.