Acer A1-840FHD - Rooting, Solve SD card issues and other? Anyone safely rooted this device?

aserMikeG
aserMikeG Member Posts: 1 New User

Has anyone been able to successfully root the Acer A1-840FHD?  I checked with One-click root and it's support page didn't have this listed as a supported image yet.  

 

If anyone has been able to accomplish this and can point me in the right direction please drop a note.  

 

The primary reason for wanting to root the device is the SD card support issues.  So if you have rooted the device can you confirm is resolves this issue?  See my comments below for a (too) long explaination of 

 

I purchased a couple of the A1-840FHD's as they seemed a fairly good price/performance mix...until I tried to download apps to the SD card and found it was limited.  I then started poking around rest of the software and found it contains a fairly limited subset of  Android v4.4.2 features.  

 

I called Acer and the support person told me the SD card issue was due to Google's restrictions this version of Android.  This seemed like an inappropriate answer for a support person to be providing the public.  I have a LG-G4 with v4.4.2 and guess what, apps load just fine on the SD card... not an issue.  While it's possible that file security changes in Kitkat could be causing some issues, an application just needs to be written to both request and receive permission from the OS to create/read/write data to a disk.  So if permissions are tighted, then the App installation program just needs to be given these permissions. This seems like a basic build feature that is designed upfront by the software engineers building the image for distribution.

 

Also, in comparing my G4 Kitkat settings versus the Acer Tab 8's there are many (maybe a hundred) settings options that don't appear in the Acer even though it has hardware support for these type of features (so I'm not refering to the phone related features). I'm wondering if Acer limits these options in the build to reduce their support cost.  Working as an engineer in EE and software engineering for 30 years make me acutely aware that options introduce complexity, and complexity indroduces costs.  While I appreciate the concern, I'd strongly suggest that Acer simply deal with this by providing a narrow supported set of features, and allow you to access all the "unsupported" stuff at your own risk.  It's easy to build in a "factory reset" step that returns the hardware back to known settings to keep the support engineering costs down.   

 

If it wasn't for the limited software, this tablet would be highly recommended by all the industry reviewing sites as many of them gave this tab really poor ratings siting two issues.  One being the battery life (which some OS options actually can help, and two, the really poor Android software build.  Must be frustrating to be a marketing manager at Acer when this potentially killer tablet gets scuttled by decisions to limit the features going out the door.

 

Again, any suggestions on rooting etc.. would be appreciated....

 

 

Answers

  • IronFly
    IronFly ACE Posts: 18,413 Trailblazer

    this kind of topic can't be discussed on this community board. Smiley Happy

     

    about your G4 KK having some options and A1-840FHD not......Acer uses nearly stock google android releases, LG customize and modify some part of android releases; so you can have apps to SD working on G4 and not on A1-840.

    but...as far as i know, this kind of modifications are against android policy on KK.

    I'm not an Acer employee.
  • Phil-3
    Phil-3 Member Posts: 1,181 Seasoned Practitioner WiFi Icon

    I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to post your comments and opinions related to this topic.

    Further discussion is no longer required and this thread will now be closed.

     

    Thank you.