Google provides a very limited set of tools for it, really only meant for devs of devices. By your line of reasoning Google has apps that don't work when roote

Google provides a very limited set of tools for it, really only meant for devs of devices. By your line of reasoning Google has apps that don't work when rooted, so therefore they shouldn't allow it at all. And i'm not contradicting or refuting myself, there are (oversimplified) 2 system partitions on Android when setup this way. It's a tradeoff they made and you can read more about the pros and cons at [0]. This is getting a bit aggressive for my tastes so this is probably my last reply, but the point i was trying to make is that most of android is designed around the fact that /system is read only and doesn't change (which is also a nice security buffer), and /data is where all user data sits, and to "factory reset" they wipe /data and nothing else. It's absolutely a trade off to have /system do double duty like that, but one that I think most people are more than happy with as the most common complaint about the system is that people can't delete "system" apps entirely. And creating a 3rd copy of those apps on /recovery so they could be deleted from /system and /user isn't really "solving" the problem, just moving it back a little, while using up a LOT more space on the user's device. [0] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab/ab_faqs https://source.android.com/devices/tech/ota/ab/ab_faqs