In case you have been living under a rock, you might not have heard that T-Mobiles HTC G2 was rooted - but only temporarily. After root was gained, it was discovered that HTC included a fail safe measure into the phone that removes root access upon reboot. This blatant attempt to stop users from rooting their phones is being called a "security measure" by HTC. T-Mobile sent the following response to Androinica after they posted an article about the inability to permanently root the G2.

As pioneers in Android-powered mobile devices, T-Mobile and HTC strive to support innovation. The T-Mobile G2 is a powerful and highly customizable Android-powered smartphone, which customers can personalize and make their own, from the look of their home screen to adding their favorite applications and more.

The HTC software implementation on the G2 stores some components in read-only memory as a security measure to prevent key operating system software from becoming corrupted and rendering the device inoperable. There is a small subset of highly technical users who may want to modify and re-engineer their devices at the code level, known as “rooting,” but a side effect of HTC’s security measure is that these modifications are temporary and cannot be saved to permanent memory. As a result the original code is restored.

HTC has widely been considered open to the rooting community, especially after Motorola's controversial use of eFuse. If you are like me, I decide what phone to buy mainly by the development community behind it. Many people (including me) thought this phone to be the holy grail of Android phones as it is the true successor to the G1 - the first rooted Android device, which has a cult following of developers long after its useful life had expired.

So what do you think, has HTC joined sides with Motorola? Are the days of rooting your device coming to an end?

[Source: Androinica]