The Android platform is growing faster than ever. This pace will not slow down soon because of the never ending line of manufacturers and largest community of developers. If you are a regular Android user and curious to know some internal android staff, you should stick with this series of article. Yes, you heard it right. It will be an ongoing series of operations, usability and hidden features of Android Operating System. Let’s dig in to Android advance features with fastboot and recovery option.
What is Android Fastboot?
Android Fastboot is probably the most questioned hidden feature. It is also the most powerful diagnostic protocol of the Android operating system. Fastboot makes the connection bridge between your smartphone’s hardware and software with computers. From Fastboot, you can modify the operating system itself and add new software components from your computer over a USB connection. You might hear about Fastboot already from a friend who is using custom ROM or from a forum notification to test the beta version of your running system. If you aren’t, let break it down.
With Android Fastboot, you can do three types of work as:
- Communicating between your phone’s hardware and software,
- Allowing a computer to communicate with your phone’s hardware, and
- Push new upgrade to your phone from computers.
Most of the manufacturing companies make Fastboot easily accessible to their user but some of them don’t. However, it can be accessible with the help of the support team and independent developer’s who develops the necessary files to unlock.
What can be done using Fastboot?
Flashing or installing a new/upgraded operating system using computers is the most use case of Fastboot. However, you can flash any type of files when you’re in Fastboot mode, even if it shouldn’t be used or the phone won’t boot up. It’s like installing a Windows Operating System on your computer using a USB drive. You can erase everything from internal storage, erase partitions or even overriding the kernel command line using Fastboot. Thus, it comes handy when you are developing any solutions which require custom booting procedures.
With some great knowledge about the internal system and required data, Fastboot can be a great tool to customize your Android!
What is Recovery Option on Android?
Like the recovery option on the computer, the Android Recovery option is also a dedicated partition where a set of instructions are pre-installed. Using Recovery option, you can repair your running system, update, factory reset and wipe out everything. As Android is an open-source, all the recovery source code, image files are available on the internet. And, using the recovery option, you can customize and install a modified operating system or applications.
There are two types of recovery option available on Android:
Stock recovery, and Custom recovery.
Stock recovery is a pretty simple setup where you can have limited access such as formatting storage, deleting user data and files, perform system update with official update package, etc. On the other hand, custom recovery is more advanced and beautifully tweaked. It offers much more than actual stock recovery. Different developers and groups develop different custom recovery every day! This recovery allows you to backup and restore your files, install custom ROM, mount/unmount selective partitions and so on.
Stock recovery isn’t as cool as the custom recoveries. However, without stock recovery, it wouldn’t be possible to develop custom ones. In addition, none of the custom ROM would be possible to develop as well.
As we have demonstrated about fastboot and Recovery option on Android, we will continue the series with lots of information of how to access, tweak and perform different actions using these features in next days. Let us know your experience in learning staffs from our site. You may also check out how to play PS4 games on Android.
