If you're a careless user, don't root your phone. If you pay attention, use common sense, and don't have a thousand Play store apps installed; you'll probably

If you're a careless user, don't root your phone. If you pay attention, use common sense, and don't have a thousand Play store apps installed; you'll probably be okay. Another way to look at it is by comparing your phone to your desktop or laptop computer. How often do you unintentionally break it with malware? Often? Don't root your phone. Rarely or never? You'll be okay. The best advice I can offer is to stay the hell away from Google Play. That trash, and the rest of their services, are the first things I strip from my phones. Instead, use properly licensed open source software, from the F-Droid repository (or similar). If it's not a proprietary app (Twitter/Facebook/Snapchat/etc.), there's likely a FOSS version that's better than anything on the Play store. Flashlight apps don't need to access your contact list, or read your call logs, or have an open port in your firewall. The damned bastards. On F-Droid you'll find (for your rooted phone): AFWall+, an IPTables firewall GUI. Very nice looking and intuitive. Don't think I've ever used a firewall so easy to configure. Autostart, an app that prevents garbage from auto-starting. A bunch of junkware usually loads up when you activate things like WiFi and GPS, or reboot the phone. Autostart can be configured to block the bloat, and in turn, make your phone run much more efficiently. Disable Manager, to disable unsavory services (Play, Facebook, etc.). If you're worried that deleting things will break the phone, this app will put your mind at ease, because you can use it to turn things off and on, like a switch, instead of outright deleting. AdAway, generic name, but it does what it's supposed to; system-wide ad blocking. It's FOSS, under GPL. If you avoid the Play store, configure your firewall, and use an ad blocker addon on Firefox, you might not even need an app like this one. There's a bunch of other cool, trustworthy, stuff on F-Droid that's not going to abuse your phone. When it comes down to it, if you stick with FOSS, you won't need to root the phone; a non-root firewall will suffice. Apologies for the rant, this was supposed to be a short reply, I don't know what happened.