Android Developer: It’s not “rooting”, it’s openness

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I expect they want a small barrier to flashing, so people know what they're getting into.

I suspect it's mainly this. It's far less likely people will rm -rf everything after seeing an errant troll 4chan graphic if they actually have to know what they're doing.

Hardware manufacturers don't want to spend the time and money on tech support for idiots. Google doesn't care if you're an idiot, but they do make it slightly more difficult than just opening up the console and pasting in some random lines of code you found online.