One of the most important parts of the whole Android architecture is the Recovery partition. A recovery partition is very common in embedded systems, and we saw an overview of it in previous chapters. As we know, the so-called Recovery is a minimal runtime system, completely decoupled from the main Android system and totally self-sufficient. Its main goal is to guarantee system integrity and provide the necessary tools to fix common minor issues and restore a properly working system.
With an Android vanilla Recovery, we can:
Update the Android system
Wipe the data partition and the cache partition
Wiping the data and cache partition is a common practice if we want to restore our device to the factory defaults, for instance, in order to have a clean system to start experimenting on something specific, or if we just want to sell it.