The One Resource You'll Need to Unroot Your Galaxy S3

For the most part, I've been enjoying having a rooted phone. It's let me hack away in Tasker with wild abandon. When Shira received an OS Update from T-mobile that my rooted phone wasn't able to receive I started to think unrooting may be in my future.

Of late, I've noticed that my battery life is getting worse and worse. Today I did a little unscientific testing: I charged the device to 100% unplugged it and waited an hour. I was down to 95%. That's 5% of battery usage while just having the phone sit next to me (WiFi, GPS and the screen were off the whole time). I gave it another hour, and lost 4% more of the batter. Over the next hour I lost a whopping 10%. Recently I tried replacing the battery, but saw no improvement. My thinking is that one of my apps must be going berserk and using battery juice, but which one? Whenever I opened up the battery status menu it said all my usage was due to the screen and went so far as to list no apps..

Between my awful battery life and the lack of ability to get updates, I figured it was time to wipe the slate clean and start over. But now that I had a rooted phone, how the heck did I get it back to a clean slate?

The answer is to slowly and carefully follow every single step of this article: [GUIDE] How-To Completely Unroot Your Galaxy SIII |Zero Flash Counter|"Normal" Status. Just like rooting, there are many resources out there, and many of them are out of date and contain broken links. Finding a reliable guide is awfully tricky.

The above procedure is especially harrowing because of the state my phone was left in between steps 4 and 5. It just sat there with the Samsung logo gently pulsating. That's all it would do. I had turned my phone into a creepy looking paperweight. Luckily, step 5 brought the device back from the dead.

Be warned: you'll be starting with a totally clean slate with the above steps. I had to re-establish my Google accounts and re-install my apps from Google Play. You don't appreciate how many odds and ends are saved on your phone (alarms, podcast subscriptions, etc.) until you start fresh.

But, as exercises go, this is a good one to do every year or so. There's nothing like that brand new phone feeling that you get as a byproduct of a full reset.