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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

The frustrating part about this is that it's getting more difficult to flash ROMs onto most phones, not easier. For instance, all Samsung Galaxy flagships since the S6 have a locked bootloader. If you have the US-based Snapdragon models, it's nearly impossible to unlock them and load custom ROMs. And if you somehow do, Samsung caps your battery at 80% or so.

There are notable exceptions. The OnePlus phones are easy to flash, as are Sony Experia models. But for the average person just looking to get a few more years out of their device, the OEMs have made it very clear how much they resent you keeping your phone beyond the two year mark.

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LG have made some nice improvements to allowing bootloader unlocking on some of their models. It's still definitely well beyond what "normal people" would be able to do, but it's nice to see from a technical standpoint. At least one model from each of the LG V10/V20/V30 and G4/G5/G6 are able to be unlocked in an official way.

http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader....

> And if you somehow do, Samsung caps your battery at 80% or so.

That sounds suspiciously like "we don't want you running firmware that causes that battery to explode on a device that features a Samsung logo prominently on it." Given their recent history, I'm not sure I blame them for that specific bit.

With Android being the concrete pillar of stable OSes that it is, I would blame them for building a phone that can explode because of a software flaw.

> With Android being the concrete pillar of stable OSes that it is, I would blame them for building a phone that can explode because of a software flaw.

Obviously they didn't build a phone that can blow up on purpose, and you don't actually have to have a real chance of it happening for other models for your legal department to tell you to cover your ass really, really well. It's not like these batteries haven't exploded in other contexts as well. Li-Ion batteries have been known to explode for a long time now. The problem with Samsung's phones was a defect that caused it to be far more likely. Also, the difference between software and hardware is much more fuzzy these days when talking about firmware. Some chips (what you might consider hardware) in the phone have their own little operating systems embedded and running in them.

The Xperia phones are very developer hostile if you ever intend to return back to the official software. Unlocking the bootloader wipes the TA partition which is required for camera and many other features on stock ROM.

It's required for the proprietary camera algorithm software. The camera still works.

That's true of older models, but unlocking the newest ones seems to break the stock camera entirely:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/xperia-xz1-compact/how-to/h...

I know that Xperia doesn't sell in the US. Assuming it sells elsewhere (Asia maybe ?), is the camera such a crown jewel for Sony to go through such lengths to punish their buyers ?

I think they are doing reasonable well in Europe.

You can restore that back after unlocking bootloader

Only if the device has a known root exploit that lets you back up the partition before properly unlocking. For example, this is not yet possible on the latest XZ1 series.

You can do it from flashtool which should work on the xz1

A safe bet is to buy whatever device google sells from the google store. All the nexus and pixel devices sold directly by google have unlockable bootloaders. Recently, google has made things worse by selling ones that can't be unlocked through carriers. From a security standpoint, google's devices are also the only ones that let you verify a third party firmware with your own keys etc. At least that's one of the reasons cited by copperheadOS. I don't think other manufacturers have that feature, even if they allow unlocking the bootloader.

Pixel isn't that simple to mod.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/7gu5ht/lineage...

That is a different issue. That's probably because of the A/B system that Pixels use. Lineage hasn't implemented that for the original Pixel either. That is not a limitation to modding per se. The real limitations to porting software, once you get beyond the bootloader, are always blobs, free drivers, kernel updates etc. At least with Pixels, they use treble. So you should be able to build AOSP with their provided blobs without too much trouble.

This is not always true, sadly. Google devices sold through Verizon do have locked bootloaders.

Actually bootloaders are not always as perfectly secure as they may seem [0]. For example, McBitter from postmarketOS is a low level reverse engineering contributor, who made remarkable progress on opening up the bootloader of Mediatek devices [1]. People who want to contribute on that level, check out the #postmarketos-lowlevel ("the kernel is high level for us") chat [2].

[0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Firmware#Bootloaders

[1]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mediatek

[2]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC#Matrix

Not only are OnePlus phones easy to flash, but doing so doesn't void your warranty. You just have to revert to OxygenOS before making an RMA.

I got my OnePlus stuck in a boot loop after installing Oxygen OS. OnePlus support scheduled a remote session and managed to flash it back to stock. I was very impressed, I had assumed they would refuse the help because I had flashed it with an unofficial OS.

Oops, I got my OSs mixed up. The bootloop was after I installed LineageOS, then OnePlus flashed it back to the official OxygenOS.

Assuming the reason you're doing an RMA doesn't preclude you from reverting to OxygenOS

A lot of Motorola phones are also easy to unlock and flash custom ROMs. Which is good since they are horrendous at providing updates.

And paradoxically moto ROMs are the only one's I've actually liked. Still running Lineage just because but their stock was arguably better.

(also I bought my model (athene) specifically because it could be unlocked, wasn't just gonna keep stock on it at that point)

HTC also offered easy unlocks since the One m7 (and probably before). Nexuses/Pixels of course are the easiest. To me it feels like Samsung is the exception here.

I had both an HTC One M7 and an M9, and while yes, unlocks are easy, that is only true if you buy directly from HTC.

OTOH, if you wanted to use them on Verizon's network, you needed a Verizon-branded HTC One, which had a locked bootloader. Getting around that usually required paying $25 to run some tool called Sunshine that could abuse an exploit to unlock the bootloader.

So where the OEM's allowed flexibility, the carriers swooped in to fill that void.

Said differently:

> I had both an HTC One M7 and an M9, and while yes, unlocks are easy, that is only true if you buy directly from HTC. ... OTOH, if you wanted to use them on Verizon's network, you needed a Verizon-branded phone

So if you buy a HTC phone, it's easy to unluck? And if you buy a Verizon phone, it's hard to unlock?

How can you blame HTC for the shortcomings on a defective phone you bought from Verizon? That's like me blaming Lenovo for problems I have with the MacBooks and OSX at work.

It just makes no sense.

Firstly, I didn't blame HTC, I blamed Verizon, hence "So where the OEM's allowed flexibility, the carriers swooped in to fill that void."

Secondly, throwing the issue of "blame" aside and trying to imply that the planned obsolescence phone is somehow the fault of the consumer, you need to consider that until very recently, you had to buy a specific hardware variant of the phone if you wanted your phone to work on Sprint or Verizon, because of the CDMA networks. It wasn't a matter of being a "Verizon-branded" phone. If you wanted to use the phone on Verizon at all, you had to buy the Verizon-specific version (even through HTC directly), and if so, the bootloader was locked.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to switch carriers if your current carrier is an ass, because they might be the only one servicing your area. So if you're on Verizon and you want a smartphone, there was a time when that meant you were likely bootloader-locked.

>> it's getting more difficult to flash ROMs onto most phones, not easier

Turns out, that is a niche use of a phone. Few people really need it.

But, some of them post on Facebook and Twitter "here is how to flash your phone and get unlimited games"

... and then many of those get bricked or attacked by viruses, and/or get otherwise disabled, and now the provider needs to deal with the tech support issues.

Plus, the ads may be redirected to someone else.

So yeah, if I was Samsung or Apple, I would not want you to flash the ROMs.

Then make it super easy to reflash them back to factory. Problem solved.

Why are you contorting to find justification for locking?

>> Then make it super easy to reflash them back to factory. Problem solved.

Or, make it super hard to flash in the first place. Problem avoided.

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