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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent, but I find it mind boggling that so few phones offer bootloader unlocking - which is essential if you truly want to own your phone.

I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.

That's... a shockingly small list!? .

In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!

Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.

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To take this a step further. I want a phone that is small (doesn't have to be tiny, just iPhone SE 2020 or smaller, please), has a replaceable battery, has an unlocked bootloader, has a headphone jack, and costs $400 or less.

It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.

Most 2012 era used phones will work here. Pick one off eBay.

Batteries will be in bad shape.

Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?

'replaceable battery'

"chart of phones with replaceable batteries": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099020

it is very difficult to find good (as in "good condition") battery for a 5+ old gadget. even if you find original one - it could be expired and DoA. but more often you get "compatibles" which die in 3-6 months.

Wouldn't work very well as a phone though. The networks a 2012 phone support no longer exist. 2G and 3G are both fully shut down where I live. Even if you specifically got a 4G phone from 2012 it might not support VoLTE, so you'd be unable to make calls.

As a wifi internet device it would work but I'm not sure that's what OP is going for.

Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.

But I main the $900 pixel.

They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.

Is there an up-to-date list of their phones which allow bootloader unlocking? Not all of them do..

I guarantee you that, given your requirements, this will never be a product that you can buy.

Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.

Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.

The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.

The motorola razr flip phones are great in my opinion.

https://m.gsmarena.com/motorola_razr_60_ultra-13805.php

No headphone jack (neither the rest)

You should check the phones from Unihertz, “the worlds smallest smartphone”

there are websites made for you with millions of parameters to find the phone you need. not amazon or ebay

Filtering for GP's requirements on GSMArena.com, I only see a handful of recent phones. Some of them do have an unlockable bootloader, but all of those are made by GPL violators, so you won't get the source code necessary to really make use of that unlocked status.

EDIT: I forgot to check the "removable battery" checkbox; with it you get zero matching phones. Maybe you should've checked that before assuming GP just can't search.

Not to end on such a negative note, foregoing a maimum height and the removable battery, Sony's Xperia 5 and 10 fit the rest of the requirements and are very good phones. Hard to find for sale in the last few years, though.

hehe so just kinda made Perfect non existent product. free niche :)

Whenever someone tries to build a phone that even tries to tick those boxes y'all just find new excuses to not actually pay for it.

I forgot to mention in my comment, I also wanted it to be small.

Instead, the phone I got ended up being bigger than my last phone, and hasn't (unsurprisingly) helped my RSI at all. Go figure lol.

Does the OnePlus process work for people? They've got a form that allows you to beg them to let you unlock your phone, but it's never worked for me. Motorola works similarly but it does work, which is why I stick with them.

Is this country-specific? I've owned plenty of OnePlus devices over the years and the have all being unlockable without any issues, or without having to ask anything from anyone.

At some point OnePlus announced that they will stop sharing firmware blobs. Lineage os team announced that they will be dropping the support. Then after another few years they were back. I remember because I bought 3 and I was planning to stay with that brand because of easy unlock (via ADB), decent price and good Lineage support. Probably OnePlus reconsidered this at some point. Right now fairly new ones have support. Maybe OP was unlucky and bought one of those models from this period of time.

This has nothing to do with the unlocking though. Unlocking a OnePlus phone is just standard procedure and requires no involvement by the manufacturer.

Meanwhile Pixel doesn't require me to fill out any forms or contact anyone which is why I only use those at this point. IIRC in at least some cases the initial flip of the toggle requires internet access but that doesn't really bother me.

If the process requires anything beyond "internet access" I'm not purchasing the device.

My op 7 pro didn't require using their form in any way.

I did have to be careful to buy the variant supported by lineageos. (I think the t mobile version of this phone does require using op form, which I've heard rarely works.)

I just want Google to remove that SafetyNet crap.

Banks don't need to know if I unlocked my bootloader.

I can't even use the Waymo app either.

I'd argue that banks DO need to know that you've unlocked your bootloader, but they should present you with a "Your phone bootloader is unlocked. If you don't know what it means or you didn't do it yourself, exit the app now and contact customer support."

The problem is that app makers are lazy.

So if I call in on the phone do they need a video feed of my surroundings to verify that I'm not being extorted? Perhaps if I come into a branch in person to make a large withdrawal they need a drug test to ensure that I'm not intoxicated?

They absolutely do not have any need to know anything about my bootloader or OS version or safety net or otherwise. It's certainly true that it is within the realm of physical possibility for them to put that information to good use in a responsible manner if they had access to it. But being able to make use of something is not the same as a legitimate need.

I can see a future where a video from a hardware/software stack verified by Apple/Google is a required mechanism for authentication.

For example, you have to say or otherwise signal that you authorize the transaction to x person for y amount on z date.

I kind of do it with my tenants when I record a video walk through at the beginning and end of the lease to serve as proof of damages. I could use a checklist on paper and a signature, but I feel like a video is better evidence for me.

They don't check if you're not intoxicated, but yes it would be very sensible that when you walk into the bank and make a transaction the bank person would look at you, and if there's a strange person standing behind your back with sunglasses and a hat, they'd tell you "hey, this guy has been following you into the bank and is listening to everything you say, are you aware and are okay with that?"

Agreed. However an unlocked bootloader or non-stock OS or not passing safety net or whatever aren't equivalent to that so I'm not sure what your point is.

"We've imagined a hypothetical" is completely different from "we directly observed something that looks criminal". Like if they see that the OS version string is "known-malicious-image" fine but that's totally different.

A good example might be the memo lines on checks. You can never be certain that a string of random numbers doesn't have something to do with criminal activity but the bank won't bother you about it. Whereas when an acquaintance tried to cash a check where someone had jokingly written "thanks for the sex" on the memo line the bank apologized for having to reject it despite realizing that it was almost certainly in jest.

Ehhh most peoples' bank accounts don't get compromised by someone getting a hold of their phone long enough to hack their bootloader.

Not to mention Android deletes all your apps and cache if you go from locked to unlocked, and you have to reinstall all of them again.

> (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus

Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.

The Librem 5 would be eliminated by the additional requirements of:

> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"

> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"

Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.

[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).

[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.

> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"

First, it is a flagship GNU/Linux phone. Second, https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

> I got ~11 hours of battery life

Looks like you didn't enable the suspend. Later updates brought it to >20 hours.

> simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.

When was it? I never experienced this. It could be a problem in the first years though. Current PureOS Crimson is stable.

> Looks like you didn't enable the suspend

This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson (which I did to recover from the infinite boot loop), so if there is some active step that needs to be taken to enable suspend, then I had not done it.

> When was it?

This was within the past month. I see two possible reasons you didn't run into it:

1) You have been applying the updates as they come out, whereas I took a dusty phone that hadn't been turned on in years and ran the update.

2) You were already on crimson, so maybe they only broke byzantium (or whatever version it was on from years of sitting unused and then hitting update in the software center).

> This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson

This is strange. See this post concerning the battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/. Have you updated the modem firmware?

You are right, I have case 1). It is quite likely that Byzantium is (was) much less stable, as it required a lot of hacks and relied on a very old Debian version.

I had some time to check today, and it seems the suspend feature is disabled by default. I just enabled it so I'll see how that goes. Thanks!

> Have you updated the modem firmware?

Nope, but I just looked it up and Purism's site states:

"These files are controlled by a third-party and are not publicly accessible. Contact Purism Support to request these files for a firmware update"

Yikes....

Purism is probably not allowed to freely distribute that firmware. With the old modem firmware, modem cannot wake up the phone upon a call.

And Fairphone!

This is a regional thing - a lot of manufacturers offer bootloader unlocking in EU when they don't in US for example. US especially is a nasty carrier monopoly where carriers are allowed (and actively defended) when they do henous lockin.

Sony used to be surprisingly good on this - but I'm uncertain what the current status actually is:

https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...

> Note: New devices XQ-CT62 (1Ⅳ US variant) and XQ-CQ62 (5Ⅳ US variant) do not support bootloader unlock.

https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-bootloader-and-root-guide-xpe...

Motorola? Is there an up-to-date list of devices where they're "so kind" as to allow bootloader unlocking? Because it's a lottery to me..

It's always a hit or miss with Motorola, but this should up your chances:

https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...

FxTec Pro1 comes with an unlocked bootloader, and a slide-out keyboard for the true 2010 experience!

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