Is YouTube Cracking Down On Android Rooting Videos?

July 31 10:18 2015 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

An interesting e-mail came to our inboxes this morning from YouTube (pictured above) – and sadly it wasn’t about getting recognized as a good content creator. Apparently the “YouTube community” (who knows who that is at this point?) has flagged one of our rooting videos as “inappropriate”. Weird, we know. Last we checked we were following all the guidelines and was not once inappropriate in that video, but we digress. YouTube “reviewed the content” and has deemed it proper to remove it – without a trace – from YouTube.

The video in question was a Rooting Guide for a local phone – the MyPhone Rio. At the time of posting that video, the Rio was quite popular but had a major flaw: limited app storage, and no SD card install option for large app data. Root and memory swap was the fix, so we made a guide. Eventually, MyPhone updated the Rio to allow for SD installs so the guide became obsolete. Although some Rio variants still had SD install issues and users appreciated the guide to some extent.

Today the guide is over one year old and is 90% not applicable to new devices, so we don’t really mind it’s deletion from YouTube. However, what about other creators that make rooting guides? Pinoyscreencast‘s MediaTek rooting video has been deleted today as well. That’s not just a coincidence. So is YouTube deleting Rooting videos, and why?

While two rooting guides isn’t much content, you have to wonder what happens if YouTube just deletes all root guides on their video service. You may just get stuck with a MyPhone Rio with no way to install apps or finding ways to fix, or imagine YouTube channels dedicated to rooting just disappearing.