That's often a sign of poor OS design not really a goal on it's own.

And you are probably not an engineer.

As a passenger I suspect you would expect different standards from an Aircraft autopilot than a cellphone. But, there is a lot to be learned from system that just work.

> But, there is a lot to be learned from system that just work.

From the hacker ethics by Stephen Levy:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_ethic&oldi...

"Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

Levy is recounting hackers' abilities to learn and build upon pre-existing ideas and systems. He believes that access gives hackers the opportunity to take things apart, fix, or improve upon them and to learn and understand how they work. This gives them the knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. Access aids the expansion of technology."

There's definitely a vanishingly-small proportion of hackers around here, relative to the reputation the site tries to encourage. Lots of people who might be branded "prescriptive social engineers," but not many hackers.

What are some examples of applications that you typically run as root?

Besides the usual suspects that you run as root because of the "limitations" of the OS, like installing applications/binaries etc.: All the kinds of debugging/tinkering tools needing special permissions, such as Wireshark, attaching a debugger to a running process, tools for generating and handling raw network frames (a capability that I need surprisingly often), ...

This is what spontaneously comes to my mind. But if I reflected for some time probably more things would come to my mind.

These are the kinds of tasks that I would expect to require root access. I don't want some random rogue application sniffing my network packets or attaching debuggers to other processes. While peoples use cases certainly vary, I've also never needed to or cared to do these things on my phone, so lack of root hasn't bothered me. YMMV.

There are many definitions of hacker and sniffing packets on your phone or attaching debuggers to apps on your phone are only one narrow definition of many.

> There are many definitions of hacker and sniffing packets on your phone or attaching debuggers to apps on your phone are only one narrow definition of many.

The willingness to look under the hood or desire to at least be able to do so is a rather universal property of hackers.

But doing so on your phone isn't necessarily.

You're putting me into a category (or excluding me from one) based on your own subjective opinion on the meaning of "hacker".

I don't really care for the label, but I think you are probably still wrong. Just because I have no interest in doing this with my phone, doesn't mean I don't elsewhere in my life. For example, you don't know about the time I took a MIDI controller apart and nodded it to add more functionality (both physical hardware and software). Or the time I spent reverse engineering the Diameter protocol with wireshark (yes I have used it) so I could figure out how to talk to another system (technically this was for work, but I didn't have to inspect the packets to learn how to use it), or any time I've stepped through a binary in a debugger to see what it does, or inspected some source code, or the time I tried to fool RF sensors with a home-made EMP device, or written some utility or otherwise hacked the world to do what I wanted it to. Yes, I am willing to look under the hood if it helps achieve my goals or if it's fun to do so.

Yet somehow all of that is irrelevant because I have no desire to do any of that on my cell phone. Or maybe the world isn't as black and white as you're making it out to be.