A Beginner’s Guide to Custom Recovery

Every Android smartphone comes with a recovery pre-installed on it called the stock recovery. The stock recovery is developed by Google. The manufacturers make little changes to the recovery, makes changes in the appearance and installs it on the phones. The stock recovery does a lot of things such as wiping cache, wiping data, backup, restore data and install an update manually.

What is a Custom Recovery?

Although, the stock recovery can do a lot of things, It still has a lot of limitations. That’s where a custom recovery comes to save. It isn’t developed by the manufacturer and has the ability to do things which the stock recovery can’t. For an instance, one can’t flash a Custom ROM via stock recovery, but one can flash it via custom recovery.

Advantages of a Custom Recovery

A custom recovery is more powerful than the stock recovery. It provides users with a lot of features and functions not present in the stock recovery. Some popular custom recoveries also have a good user interface and support touch (Helps if buttons aren’t working). Below are the reasons why one should go for a custom recovery over the stock recovery.

Flash a Custom ROM

A custom ROM is the operating system version which isn’t built by the manufacturers. Since it isn’t built by the manufacturers one can’t flash it directly. To flash a custom ROM you need access to the root and need a custom recovery. A stock recovery is helpful, but it doesn’t have the power and the ability to flash a custom ROM.

Root your Device

There are multiple ways to root an Android device. The safest and popular method is flashing the SuperSU using the custom recovery. If you plan to root your device using the flashing method, you’ll surely need to flash the custom recovery. However, you don’t have to flash a custom recovery to root your Android device if you use Kingroot or other apps like it. However, we don’t recommend using Kingroot to root your device. Don’t know what rooting is? Check our beginners guide to rooting.

Flash a custom kernel

The Android operating system was built on the Linux kernel, people who aren’t happy with their Android smartphones performance would generally want to either overclock the CPU and change the CPU profiles. But there are chances that manually messing up with the clock rate can mess up with the smartphone. That’s why a lot of developers develop custom kernels, test them on various devices and release them.

The custom kernels are very stable, as a lot of people test them. Another sad thing about the stock recovery is, it doesn’t allow the users to flash a custom kernel. With a custom recovery, you can easily flash a custom kernel.

Take & Restore Nandroid Backup

The stock recovery allows you to take the backup of the device, but that isn’t a full backup. In developer terms, a full backup is called as a Nandroid backup. You can easily take the backup of everything on your phone (system + recovery + data) using a powerful custom recovery like TWRP.

A powerful custom recovery like TWRP can take individual backup and restore the individual backup too. So, you can basically take the backup of the system alone too, or the data partition too. This isn’t possible with the stock recovery.

Full System Wipe

People who are new to the custom recovery and flashing ROMs would think that it would be so stupid to wipe the full system. But, there can be some instances where you might have to wipe the entire system. Say you just shifted to a different custom ROM, there are chances that it might lag, it’s because of some problems with the existing system files. That’s why before flashing a custom ROM, it is a good idea to make full system wipe (which would remove the existing system)

Change Partition File System

There are different partitions of our android phones. The common partitions which might come across are the system partition, data partition, and the cache partition. The custom recovery enables you to change the partition file system individually. So say, you want a particular file system format to be changed, you can do that too! Don’t know which Android File system is the best for you? Check our complete guide to Android File System.

A Good User Interface

The stock recoveries have a design which sucks. Many popular custom recovery software has a wonderful design which is very easy to use. The ease of use enables the user to find the things he is looking for at right place. A lot of people don’t actually care about the user interface of a custom recovery since they already know much about the custom recovery and their features. But people who are new to a custom recovery would prefer a nice and easy to use user interface.