[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Questions & Answers] oblivioncth:
Hey all,

First off let me just say great work to everyone involved with rooting this now "ancient" phone, especially klabit87 and jrkruse. Additionally, I do not mean to be ungrateful with this post, nor suggest that rooting a phone is easy, especially one with a locked bootloader, or that the users here are entitled to such a feature.

With that out of the way....

I haven't looked into rooting this phone EVER until now. Haven't even peaked at XDA or Googled anything, I didn't even know it was possible until yesterday. I've re-ROMed all my previous phones but was actually satisfied with the stock S7 experience other than a Launcher swap and dealing with the always laggy Google maps. Well recently I got a new car and got fed up with the obnoxious list/action limit that Android Auto has as the voice search can be quite unreliable, the letter search is somewhat bugged on the media player I use, and in the end all it does is encourage people to just use their phone to change songs/settings and send messages, thereby completely failing at its goal of being safer. So, I really wanted to get Xposed installed to use the module that makes AA a lot more usable; however, now that I've looked back into the scene a bit, I'm not so sure I want to move forward.

To preface my question: Every Android device I've had before was essentially either rootable or not and ultimately banked on a security exploit that was eventually found. There were never really any concerns about major issues unless you were changing ROMs, kernels, or testing major CPU behavior changes. Just rooting itself was almost always issue free other than a small bug or two or the need to reapply at reboot.

From what I gather, it seems to me that they only way currently to gain root privileges on this device is to install this ENG kernel that's talked about in a lot of more recent posts. Is it truly the case that someone had to write a kernel from scratch that was pre-rooted and as of right now there is no way to root the device as it is stock? Is it that the only known exploit is how to flash another kernel, and the stock kernel is still locked up tight? It sucks that the current root seems so unstable/slow. I know there are a plethora of fixes but there really is no one major fix (other than potentially reflashing the stock bootloader that for some reason seems to work), and its a matter of installing a boat load of CPU and resource management tweaks and even then the performance/battery life isn't quite stock. Additionally it seems like its definitely a YMMV kind of thing as some users seem to still have significant battery drain or slowness/heat even after trying tons of fixes.

Since I am just now getting familiar with the "homebrew" the phone I've had for 3+ years and know nothing about the work that's been done, I genuinely just want to know the technical implications that got in the way of a cleaner root and why the current root method is stuck as sort of a work-around so to speak. The people that manage these breakthroughs rarely post about the process they went through unless its pertinent to a guide on how to root, so I was just curious why the root for this device is in the current state it is.

I would really like to root my Edge so I can be done with the AA nonsense but after just getting a new battery put in I really don't want to go through ****ty battery life again haha.

Thanks to all who weigh in.