Google only directly controls the Pixel line.
OEMs may be forced to do the same, but 3rd party ROMs will not.
I do agree this cuts deeply for F-Droid.
OEMs may be forced to do the same, but 3rd party ROMs will not.
I do agree this cuts deeply for F-Droid.
Google are also making that harder, at least for the Pixel line by no longer publishing the device tree as part of AOSP.
I know Fairphone do publish a buildable tree - though it's not yet available for their latest device - does anyone else?
Originally, device makers who used Android themselves were contractually prohibited from manufacturing devices for any company that forked Android, for instance.
Not sure why you're calling this non-unlockable. Everything is unlockable with enough money.
Maybe we use some hardware-level trick to get to some protected firmware initially to reverse engineer it, but almost universally it's what reads the state of the fuses (or something after it) that actually gets exploited. That's changing, too, but in general very slowly and at at the pace of hardware manufacturers learning how to make software (aka, glacial with a few notable exceptions).
Fairphone wanted to give users full access on the Fairphone 2, but were contractually disallowed if they wanted to also ship the Android Market, Google Maps, etc., which users can't otherwise install themselves so it was essential to pre-install for a normal user experience. That's why they made two OSes for that phone: a googleful one and a free OS based on AOSP that you can install if you don't want Google (https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-op...). Nowadays they let the /e/ Foundation do that work with e/OS. They're supportive of it but apparently don't have the internal manpower to continue making and supporting an extra distribution