I still sometimes ponder if oneplus green line fiasco is a failed hardware fuse type thing that got accidentally triggered during software update. (Insert I can't prove meme here).
The effects on custom os community is causing me worried ( I am still rocking my oneplus 7t with crdroid and oneplus used to most geek friendly) Now I am wondering if there are other ways they could achieved the same without blowing a fuse or be more transparent about this.
Google pushed a non-downgradable final update to the Pixel 6a.
I was able to install Graphene on such a device. Lineage was advertised and completely incompatible, but some hinted it would work.
You absolutely do not, this is an extremely healthy starting position for evaluating a corporations behavior. Any benefit you receive is incidental, if they made more money by worsening your experience they would.
This makes sense and much less dystopia than some of the other commenters are suggesting.
Not surprisingly, stolen phones tend to end up in those locations.
I have however experienced that a ISP will write to you because you have a faulty modem (some Huawei device) and asks you to not use it anymore.
I don't believe for a second that this benefits phone owners in any way. A thief is not going to sit there and do research on your phone model before he steals it. He's going to steal whatever he can and then figure out what to do with it.
Thieves these days seem to really be struggling to even use them for parts, since these are also largely Apple DRMed, and are often resorting to threatening the previous owner to remove the activation lock remotely.
Of course theft often isn't preceded by a diligent cost-benefit analysis, but once there's a critical mass of unusable – even for parts – stolen phones, I believe it can make a difference.
Thieves don't do that research to specific models. Manufacturers don't like it if their competitors' models are easy to hawk on grey markets because that means their phones get stolen, too.
Android's normal bootloader unlock procedure allows for doing so, but ensures that the data partition (or the encryption keys therefore) are wiped so that a border guard at the airport can't just Cellebrite the phone open.
Without downgrade protection, the low-level recovery protocol built into Qualcomm chips would permit the attacker to load an old, vulnerable version of the software, which has been properly signed and everything, and still exploit it. By preventing downgrades through eFuses, this avenue of attack can be prevented.
This does not actually prevent running custom ROMs, necessarily. This does prevent older custom ROMs. Custom ROMs developed with the new bootloader/firmware/etc should still boot fine.
This is why the linked article states:
> The community recommendation is that users who have updated should not flash any custom ROM until developers explicitly announce support for fused devices with the new firmware base.
Once ROM developers update their ROMs, the custom ROM situation should be fine again.
Sophisticated actors (think state-level actors like a border agent who insists on taking your phone to a back room for "inspection" while you wait at customs) can and will develop specialized tooling to help them do this very quickly.
This feature doesn't allow unlocking the bootloader (as in, execute a custom ROM), it's designed to install factory-signed code. However, using it to "restore" an old, vulnerable factory code would obviously cause issues.
Which includes old, vulnerable versions and all patched, newer versions. By burning in the minimum version, the old code now refuses to boot before it can be exploited.
This is standard practice for low-level bootloader attacks against things like consoles and some other phone brands.
They don't want the hardware to be under your control. In the mind of tech executives, selling hardware does not make enough money, the user must stay captive to the stock OS where "software as a service" can be sold, and data about the user can be extracted.
To be fair, they are right: the vast majority of users don't give a damn. Unfortunately I do.
Give ROM developers a few weeks and you can boot your favourite custom ROMs again.
Specifically GrapheneOS on Pixels signs their releases with their own keys. And with the rollback protection without blowing out any fuses.
I know that all these restrictions might make sense for the average user who wants a secure phone.. but I want an insecure-but-fully-hackable one.
OnePlus just chose the hardware way, versus Apple the signature way
Whether for OnePlus or Apple, there should definitively be a way to let users sign and run the operating system of their choice, like any other software.
(still hating this iOS 26, and the fact that even after losing all my data and downgrading back iOS 18 it refused to re-sync my Apple Watch until iOS 26 was installed again, shitty company policy)
There is a good reason to prevent downgrades -- older versions have CVEs and some are actually exploitable.