US mobile operator Verizon has been distributing Android 2.2 upgrade to Motorola Droid owners over the past few weeks. Earlier this week, an additional update was made to Froyo to enable Flash support. If you follow Android news, this probably is not such a surprise to you. What you might find interesting is the fact that rooted devices have been getting notified about the update just like their non-rooted friends.

The process of rooting your Android device gives you access to a lot of great features and software you wouldn’t otherwise have access to, but it takes one feature away. You can’t receive over the air updates anymore once you’ve rooted your phone. Despite that fact, it seems Verizon is pushing an update to rooted users.  This is the first time since the first Android phone was rooted that anyone has reported receiving a notification about an OTA update on their rooted phone. It’s important to note, that if you have installed a custom ROM, you probably won’t receive the update. Anyone still using stock software should be seeing the update within the next few days if they haven’t already.

If you own a Motorola Droid, and you’re not already running a Froyo build of Android, you’ll soon receive a 76mb OTA update to get you up to speed. If you are already running Android 2.2, you’ll get a smaller 1.8mb update that will enable Flash 10.1 support. You’ll still have to download the Flash app, but your phone will now be ready for it. Rooted or not, Flash will open up a lot of new doors for Droid users.

It’s great that Verizon is offering this update to rooted users, but we have to wonder if this isn’t the first step toward finding a way to un-root rooted phones remotely. Rooting your phone allows you to circumvent certain paid services from Verizon, such as tethering, and as such, it’s likely that they’re trying to find a way to combat rooring. If Verizon is trying to combat rooting, they still have a long way to go. Rooted users running custom ROM’s haven’t been receiving the update, in other words, if this is the first step toward Verizon unrooting phones, all someone would have to do to sidestep the whole process would be to install a custom version of the Android OS. For now, all we know is that rooted users are starting to see Android updates. As for the rest, only time will tell.

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