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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

Honestly be glad that google still allows bootloader unlocking. And the WiFi requirement is very small, and the article is overblowing it.

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Yeah, the state of affairs with Google is better than any other mainstream vendor.

It seems lame that you have to phone home to unlock a new device, but it's nothing compared to what they could be doing.

OnePlus has no such restrictions that I've seen, from the One to the 8T. I haven't heard of them locking down newer ones either. You just run the usual command to unlock the bootloader, no funny business. I've run a custom ROM on all of them that I've owned.

One plus actually required an account to unlock the boot loader on one of the devices I owned. You had to log in and submit a request for unlocking.

Perhaps they aren't all this onerous, but that really put me off of them.

OnePlus also doesn't allow enrollment of custom signing keys like Pixels do so they're objectively worse for your ownership even if they don't phone home.

Their security patch and update support for hardware is also abysmal.

> It seems lame that you have to phone home to unlock a new device, but it's nothing compared to what they could be doing.

My guess is that it's protection against stolen hardware? They can basically ban S/N of stolen phones, and the thieves can't unlock the bootloader and resell the device.

But yeah, it seems like a reasonable thing. Out of all the vendors, Pixel phones are by far the easiest to unlcok, seems like a weird thing to complain about.

If Sony counts as mainstream vendor, the bootloader is unlockable and they even provide instructions on how to build and flash your own Android! https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices

> To unlock your device you need an unlock code

This appears strictly worse than Google.

It's precisely the same as with Google, just that Google does it directly via an API call and Sony does it with you manually typing the code.

Having to find a website, find identifiers from ones phone, go through the form, and enter the unlock code is a non trivial barrier to entry.

There is a huge difference between the two approaches.

Yeah, sony's is the better approach because it doesn't force me to connect the device to the internet. Both are deplorable practices.

For all we know it's just Google activating the device to ensure it wasn't stolen and reflashed with another OS. Apple requires a device to be activated before it's usable.

That likely is exactly what's going on. That raises the question though if you really bought a functional phone or not - you may have paid for it but even then it only works if the company is still supporting it and allows you to use it.

Agreed. It's fine for most cases and keep security and anti-fraud. If they are serious privacy phobia, I don't know why they want to buy Google products.

Counterintuitively, Pixels are great for "serious privacy phobia" people, as they are one of few phones that can be flashed with a custom OS and have the bootloader locked. GrapheneOS only supports Pixels for this reason.

Yeah, I can see where this isn't ideal in principle, but in practice it's completely insignificant for 99.99% of users. I unlocked my Pixel phone first thing and I never even noticed this requirement. It's not like you were planning to buy a flagship smartphone and then not connect it to the internet.

If you're really worried about Google installing something sinister, it's already too late--the made they thing, they could have installed whatever they want at the factory. Anyway if you're installing a custom OS it's trivial to wipe on install.

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