[One (M8) Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] GedBlake:
Hi, v1n0dhn...

I suspect you've sort of answered your own question here...

...and I sort of wonder if you're looking for somebody to

talk you out of rooting it

... Hoping that somebody might say... "DON'T ROOT!!! It's not worth it... It's a bloody horrible nightmare of bricked phones and melted aluminium and blue smoke... ARGHH."

Obviously, this isn't the case... Rooting the M8 is reasonably straightforward, and my own M8 continued to perform normally and perfectly fine as it did before I rooted it.

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Of course, once rooted, you won't easily be able take OTAs to upgrade from whatever version of Android you're currently running to the next version of version of Android (and with Android 6, Marshmallow waiting in the wings sometime over the next few months, this is worth bearing in mind) and the recent OTA that addresses the Stagefright vulnerability. These Over-The-Air updates, and others in the future, will fail, and cause your M8 to become softbricked, if your M8 is rooted.

There are ways around these problems, but may require you to restore non-rooted Nandroid backups specifically for your device/carrier, and some solutions may require you to run a ROM Update Utility (RUU) in order to restore back to pure unrooted stock in order for take future OTAs.

And possibly, ultimately, you **may** need to acquire S-OFF, in order to do this. This will cost you $25 for the use of Sunshine.

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I come from a Nexus tablet background, and rooting and flashing stuff on those devices is a piece of cake. And you can ALWAYS and EASILY revert back to the original factory stock ROM. And unroot just as easily.

With the HTC One M8, things are not so straightforward.

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Here are some (slightly) rhetorical points for you to consider?

** What are the benefits of rooting? What functionality do I gain by rooting? Can these benefits be acquired by other (non-rooted) means?

** How easy (or difficult) is to revert my phone back to the state it was in when I first took it out of the box? Can I do this, once I've rooted it? And is it difficult?

** Despite what you may have read, from guys who've had years of Android experience... modding, rooting, flashing customs ROMs, kernels etc... I don't think that any of this should be considered routine and akin to just installing the latest Angry Birds :). These is RISK involved... albeit low risk if you're just rooting, but risk nonetheless. You are, after all, messing with the underlying Android operating system.

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If your phone is

THIS

important and critical to your life...

...then my honest answer, and my sincere advice is DO NOT ROOT... (I'm not saying not ever, just not now - but perhaps maybe in the future).

You need the knowledge and confidence to know what to do when you're faced with a bootlooping device, or if TWRP won't fastboot flash... or anything else that might go wrong... And sometimes they occasionally do.

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Read everything you can about root, what it is, what benefits it confers, what are the pitfalls, and what are the risks.

Regarding the M8 specifically... read about RUUs, CIDs and MIDs, Sunshine S-ON/OFF, bootloader unlocking and sundry other topics.

Read, Read, Read, Read, Read... And more Read.

XDA is a veritable fountain of such technical knowledge. Avail yourself of it... before you even think about rooting. Acquaint yourself with the benefits and the consequences.

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There's an old carpentry aphorism...

"Measure Twice, Cut Once."

This is as true for Android as it is for putting up a fence.

Good luck in whatever you decide.

Rgrds,

Ged.