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What is Android Safe Mode, Recovery Mode and User Mode

Android is the most used mobile operating system these days. It has a market share of over 75% according to various surveys conducted by various companies. Android is not just the operating system that you see on the screen of your phone, but there is a lot more to it on the back-end that you actually never get to see. One of these things is support for different modes. These modes are generally classified into Safe Mode, Recovery Mode, Download Mode and User Mode. Let me discuss with you what three of these modes are in a slight detail in this article.

Safe Mode

Safe Mode

Safe mode is a specific Android mode which helps you in troubleshooting problems on your device. This mode is for people who know what they are doing with their device. Safe mode allows you to boot your device into a mode where no third-party apps are loaded with the operating system, and can’t be run by the user. It is just like the phone that came out of the box. It allows you to figure out if a specific problem on your device is due to Android itself or due to some third-party app that you have installed on your device. When in Safe mode, there will be an icon indicating that you are in safe mode. Once you end safe mode, you can access your device like you normally would with all your apps.  Press the power key and then long press the power off option and your phone will prompt you to enter safe mode.

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Recovery Mode

Recovery Mode

Recovery Mode in Android is something that users or enthusiasts use to recover their device from a bad state. The recovery mode allows you to have some advanced options to perform certain tasks such as wipe the user data on the phone, wipe the Cache partition, and even install updates from the SD card on the device. Users who have gained root access to their device, or “rooted” their devices, have an option to install a custom recovery as well which gives them added features on the recovery mode of their device like making a backup of the entire device, and restoring these backups and many more features. The recovery mode is definitely not for casual users. You can enter recovery mode my a combination of hardware keys, which differs with every device. Just Google the combination for your phone. If you have custom recovery installed, you can directly boot into recovery mode.

User Mode

Android Lollipop

The User Mode is probably the only mode that most people will be familiar with. The User mode is the mode on Android that you get into when you boot your phone. It consists of your home screen, the app drawer and all the apps that you have installed on your device. It is the usual phone interface that the manufacturer advertises and the users use to access their phones.


Guest User Mode

With the coming of Android Lollipop last year, the Android Guest User mode has also become popular. This mode is just a subset of the User mode, which allows you to enable a Guest mode to give your phone to someone else while keeping all your data safe and protected. A guest user will not have access to your installed apps, or your personal data like music, photos, contacts and messages.

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Conclusion

In the article above, I have discussed with you the various modes that you can use your Android phone in, but for different purposes. Each mode serves a different purpose, and most of these modes are for developers or enthusiasts only. A usual customer or user would just use the User Mode and would never even have to worry about the other modes. If you are still not clear on what these modes do, feel free to ask me your doubts in the comments section below.

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Aneesh Bhatnagar

Aneesh Bhatnagar is a freelance web developer, who specializes in front-end website development with HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. He is also an Android enthusiast, and a budding Android Application developer.