Understanding the boot process of an Android device will help us to understand other forensic techniques that involve interacting with the device at various levels. When an Android device is first powered on, there is a sequence of steps that are executed, helping the device to load the necessary firmware, OS, application data, and so on into memory. The following information is compiled from the original post published at https://community.nxp.com/docs/DOC-102546.

The following is the sequence of steps involved in the Android boot process:

1. Boot ROM code execution
2. The bootloader
3. The Linux kernel
4. The init process
5. Zygote and Dalvik
6. The system server

We will examine each of these steps in detail.