Flashify for root users

As a power user, there is a lot of concerns that would be piling on your plate when you wanted to conduct in-depth operations into the core of your device. While Android – and ultimately, your phone – is built to withstand a lot of errors, either machine or human, doing any operation as a super user and you’re expected to understand the risks you would be taking on. One thing foremost is the risk of ‘bricking’ – or completely breaking your device and turning it into a brick: Useless.

It has been a concern for many, and it has also been a concern for me. We need something that is reliable and secure to modify higher level settings in our phone without risking our necks way too much. And for a long time, I’ve always defaulted to Flashify, aside from trusty TWRP already built into my device natively from a custom ROM.

Most of the time when I use to the greatest extent the power of a super user, it was to flash a new ROM into my device. Be it a custom ROM, or an updated version of the custom ROM. Since it is what Flashify is made primarily to do, I would assume that you’re interested in doing the same thing: Securely, this time around.

Well then, one of the advantage I found in Flashify is the fact that I don’t have to boot into recovery, which, for me, is a strenuous process. Somehow it always took me five or more minutes to boot into my recovery since it took me a long while to get the button combination right on the boot screen. That is the reason why I’ve found Flashify’s capability to directly flash .zip or .img files containing the things I need to update my device with from the internal storage itself extremely useful. It’s almost plug and play.

Another thing about this app is that it doesn’t need me to manually build a Nandroid backup just in case something went wrong in the flashing process. While this is one of the thing that TWRP actually supported, one thing that crossed me the wrong way is that the files are stored internally on my device.

My phone’s storage space is inherently low is one thing, but I have concerns that it would require me to trust my phone in always being able to boot up even when it bricked itself for me to access the backup files. In other word, if one of these days an operation went wrong and I couldn’t boot into recovery or TWRP … technically, my phone’s just up and buried itself along with all of my data.

That’s why I found Flashify’s ability to sync all of my files into the cloud, either through Dropbox or Drive to be much more reassuring. Instead of having all of the most important files to recover my device on the device that I would be trying to recover, it’d be independent and safe on the cloud. A finer aspect of this arrangement is that the files would constantly be synced whenever they’re changed so I really don’t have to worry about having to update the files consistently or manually before doing any extensive changes to the phone in the future.

Flashify is also a full-fledged ‘flash management’ software. Unlike TWRP which is built entirely to aid you with a Swiss knife filled with tools that you could possibly need. Flashify allows you to queue up the tools and the files you want to operate on and go through them in an orderly fashion.

You could have a history of recently flashed files, the ability to flash multiple files and forming a queue. That is one of the thing I found TWRP still lacks, and Flashify really did deliver well.

Nonetheless, Flashify did not claim to be a recovery software like TWRP. Instead, it is more of a middle-man between operating on your phone directly on the main screen, and the technical back-alley of the recovery mode that would be handled by the likes of TWRP and Philz. That’s why you can directly download and flash these into your device before you can exercise the entirety of Flashify’s muscles.

Lastly, and certainly, since Flashify tampers directly with system files for the nature of its operation. You need root privilege in order to use it. But if you’ve came this far, I think you already know this from the very beginning.