I don't really follow this. Rooting the device and changing the launcher are different things.
Oh nvm I get what you are getting at.
Rooting is not the same thing as flashing a new ROM (like if you wanted to flash a 4.4.3 based ROM but your carrier is only offering you 4.4)
I assumed you would have to root the phone in order to apply updates your carrier didn't send to you, thats why I asked about rooting... so you can flash it without rooting?
One thing most people don't understand, especially if you use the iOS (which is relatively more uniform) is how android works across various devices.
The Android ecosystem is similar to how there's quite a few different linux distribution.
Every manufacturer basically mods Android for their devices (quite poorly at that too).
So Google will release Android KitKat and Samsung and HTC will take that code and turn it into Frankenstein.
So you can think of it like this Samsung uses Ubuntu and HTC uses Fedora. Except that while Ubuntu and Fedora actually develop, manage and upgrade their OS's by themselves. Samsung and HTC are reliant on Google to release a new version of Android before they themselves start modding it. Well that's a simple way of putting it and I know this isn't 100% accurate.
This creates basically so many different version of Androids that are different. So if you have a Samsung you're not actually running 4.4, you're running a Samsung customized ROM that's based on 4.4 In addition to these huge differences (again, it's like running a different distro you also have to factor in hardware differences).
It's very difficult to explain this to people.
That's why the Android market is so fragmented.
That's why people also place such a huge emphasis on stock and that's the significance of Google play edition devices.
So there's a catch.
Because your phones aren't open source like the Nexus, there's a chance your
phone doesn't actually have a stock ROM for you to flash or at least not immediately. Alot of phones run into this issue.
Going back to your question.
Yes, you can flash a ROM without rooting.
You can't use an official OTA when you have a rooted device though. It'll brick your device.
It's like when you jailbreak your Iphone and install Cydia and that other thing, you can't upgrade your iOS without breaking your jailbreak. In this case though, it's your phone that breaks.
Every time you want to update, you have to flash a new ROM over your existing ROM.
There's also dirty flashing and clean flashing too ... anyways
Nexus and GPE devices have a wider variety of customs roms (that are tweaked by developers) due to open source and blah blah blah. Check out paranoid android for starters. You can get into this at our own time. Again, non nexus devices run the risk of not having stock roms which means developers can't do jack ****.
Some custom ROMs also let you OTA within their ROM "distro".
PA 3 -> PA 3.1 OTA yay!
Since you might always have to flash a new ROM, if you have root access you can backup your stuff to varying degrees to make this task easier.
So I went over this during that Nokia thread.
Anyways, you basically just need to unlock the bootloader (which wipes your device) and turnsoff any proprietary bull**** lock that your phone has to flash a ROM.
So rooting just gives root access which is not the same thing as flashing.
Rooting gives you root access. It's like getting admin access on your computer.
Flashing a ROM is like installing a new OS.
It's like if you had a laptop that was only designed to run on Fedora and then you flashed Redhat over it.
You guys have rooting on the iPhone but you don't really have the equivalent of Flashing a ROM.
You guys also don't have to deal with extensive fragmentation.
So it kinda breaks down like this.
If you have a Nexus -> Stock OTA or Custom ROMs that are significantly different and improved.
If you have a non-nexus -> you need to hope that there's a stock rom out there that developers can use otherwise your options are very limited. Unlocking the boatloader + propietary things is also a pain the ass
