Alas that in the US it is seemingly impossible to get unlocked bootloaders now. I'm trying to figure out what couple-year-old international phone to buy now.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
Good on Motorola. Incredibly smart to tap these passionate geniuses.
I once bought a oneplus phone to unlock the bootloader, they have the same process requiring an account etc, saying it could take up to 2 weeks to get the code. they never emailed it to me so I returned the phone.
It can be difficult to tell if the bootloader is unlocked from the listing though. There ought to be a legal requirement to clearly label that detail.
Searching duckduckgo for 'Unlocked {device}' returns a lot of results on the shopping tab for phones on Amazon and eBay like the pixel 8/9 plus plenty of other "recent" android devices. Walmart and Bestbuy seem to still have dedicated sections for unlocked phones as well.
But Samsung hasn't allowed unlocking the bootloader on their phones for many years. And they are far far from the only ones in that state.
You basically have to research each specific phone far ahead of time. And beware! Because there's, for example, lots of guides telling you how to unlock my S22 phone. But as of ~2023 Samsung now blocks all those previous exploits that the unlocked software used to use.
It's a mess and a half.
Not like I would try to give you advice on unlocking your phone in the first place as I'm mostly clueless myself.
Maybe time to trade up or sideways? Graphene OS only officially supports Google Pixel devices anyway(for now). If Motorola could somehow recapture the magic of the Razer today with a new phone, that would be cool too!