LG Root Checker Tool Causing Rooted Phones To Lag Terribly

As far as openness goes, LG seems to sit somewhere in between Sony, who mostly embraces unlocking its phones, and Samsung, notorious for keeping its devices locked down. It seemed that, for a time, LG has been appealing to Android power users and modders but apparently that may come at a cost. A few XDA members have noticed how their rooted LG phones were significantly slower than before they rooted. Doing some detective work revealed a certain Root Checker Tool to blame, and it is one that even rooted users can't easily resolve.

To be fair to LG, the manufacturer may have some right to check whether it's device has been rooted or not. This is for the purpose of withholding certain functionality that may be compromised by a rooted device, like payment systems and such. This is no different from the way Samsung's Knox detects whether a phone is rooted or not and disables features like Samsung Pay as appropriate.

What LG doesn't have the right to is to penalize users for having a rooted device, whether or not LG actually supports that action. Or at least if it really want to take such an unpopular move, it should have the decency to inform users before hand.

None of that is happening with this Root Checker Tool or RCT. According to XDA Senior Member dimm0k, who investigated the performance hit on his rooted T-Mobile LG V20 thoroughly, the RCT kicks in at boot and starts many processes over and over again, taking up precious processing resources and, therefore, negatively affecting performance overall. XDA tested over LG devices and found that to be true for a rooted T-Mobile LG G5 and an unlocked European LG G5, running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and Android 7.0 (Nougat).

Given the rather primitive behavior of the RCT, it almost feels more like a bug than an intentional but secretive method to dissuade users from rooting their phones. But that doesn't really matter much to the end user who can't disable the tool at all. RCT is embedded into the boot of the device, which isn't accessible even to a rooted user. The only way to disable it is to "repack" the boot image without the RCT bits and flash it on the phone, but that requires someone to create such an image first, like what dimm0k has done for LG V20 users.

VIA: XDA