[ZenFone 2 General] J M L:
In preparation for the impending upgrade to Android 6 Marshmallow, I'm trying an experiment on my Android 5 based Zenfone 2. I'm going to see how annoying it is to give up root. The first thing I did on my first android phone was root it, so I've only every used rooted Android devices.

Prologue:

Root on Android 6 (usually) requires an unlocked bootloader, because root is achieved by modifying the boot image to inject su into the system. That way the system image is left unmodified and can continue to pass dm-verity checks.

At the moment, there does not appear to be anyway on the Zenfone 2 to unlock the Marshmallow beta bootloader, and it also appears to relock any unlocked bootloader. In fact, the droidboot binary in the droidboot.img of the Marshmallow beta contains the strings rm -rf /factory/asuskey and rm -rf /factory/asussignature. droidboot also contains the strings unlock successfully...reboot after 5 seconds and **** Unlock bootloader? **** as well as other strings referring to unlock (droidboot from the .184 Lollipop also has those strings). So, my hope is that there is a simple way to unlock the bootloader, which will be revealed by Asus, or discovered by somebody.

My thought is that worst case those of us who want root will use an unlockable Lollipop bootloader with a Cyanogenmod 13.1 based ROM created with updates from the Asus Marshmallow source code.

Experiment:

I've removed Xposed and SuperSU from my phone. Making it stock Android 5. I'm documenting here the functionality that I lose. The first goal is for my own amusement to keep a log of what I'm giving up.

The second goal, and probably the major one, is to solicit suggestions on what can be done to replace the functionality I'm losing.

What I'm giving up:

AdAway - No system wide ad blocking. Firefox with uBlock Origin should cover blocking ads on the web. I usually buy apps I use frequently, but I'll have to see which ones are annoying with ads. I'm aware of the VPN based ad blocking methods, but I'll have to wait and see if it comes to that.

AFWall+ - Using root to improve security... I mostly use this to prevent some apps from using mobile data, and to prevent some apps from gaining network access at all.

BetterBatteryStatus - It works in non-root mode, but not as well.

BusyBox - Without root, there isn't much need for this anyway.

Cryptfs Password - Once again, security is harmed by removing root. This allowed my encryption pin to be different (and much longer) than my screen lock pin. I don't want to type 10 digits to unlock my screen, but it's fine for booting.

Greenify - This definitely kept some aps in check, but perhaps Asus' Auto-Start Manager will be able to replace it.

GSam Battery Monitor - Like BetterBatteryStatus, this had a root component to provide more information.

Kernel Adiutor - For some reason my phone seemed to only go to 1.8ghz instead of 2.3ghz, so I used this to fix it.

Linux Deploy - I never used the Linux chroot image for much, but it was a cute toy.

Secure Settings - This let tasker automate adjusting some things which require root to change.

Titanium Backup - This is a massive loss in functionality. Simply having backups is tremendously important. The ability to freeze unwanted system apps is also nice. I can reload many of my apps from Google, but not all of them bother to save their settings in the Google backup. Ohh, the bloat!

Trimmer (fstrim) - Probably not really necessary, anyway.

Xposed

Amplify - It saved me lots of wakeups, but I don't know if it really did much to increase battery life.

Fix Lollipop Memory Leak - I don't know if this did anything, either.

GravityBox [LP] - I didn't tweak too much, but what I did change was really useful.

NetStrength - I like replacing my wifi bars with useful information.

ProtectMyPrivacy - The permission settings in Marshmallow would make this obsolete anyway.

YouTube AdAway - Nice, but not required.

What I'm gaining:

Android Pay - I guess I can play with this now.