Android Developers Blog: It’s not “rooting”, it’s openness
This article nails it. Myself and the other folks who make up the Unrevoked team are basically searching for security exploits on the devices we support. We can't reveal these to the carriers, the phone manufacturers or the Android team because they'll be fixed in the next release and we'll invest the time to find another one.<i></i>* Each additional exploit is marginally more difficult than the last to find.<p>We'd much prefer to abandon our rooting efforts entirely and have the market flooded with phones that have the equivalent of "fastboot oem unlock", or have easy ways to flash custom ROMs like the Dell Streak (no signature required), the original Droid and some of Samsung's devices. The energy we spend working on root could be better applied in finding and fixing the security holes that exist on the Android platform.<p>Until then we'll keep poking holes in the security of HTC devices (our focus) and make them work as hard as possible to figure out which holes we've exploited to keep the rooting window open as long as possible. We'll also keep recommending that people put their money on open devices like the Nexus One and the Nexus S.<p><i></i>* The exception to this was the skyagent hole, where HTC and Sprint shipped a suid-root program that would give any program you installed full control of your device. We notified them of the problem, then shipped a root based on it shortly after:<p><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/34024714/Skyagent-Protocol-Description" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/34024714/Skyagent-Protocol-Descrip...</a><p><a href="http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/unrevoked1_disclosure" rel="nofollow">http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/unrevoked1_dis...</a>