The official process was a pain anyway, as it required sending personal identification data to China. Anyone that wants a custom ROM on their phone should be looking elsewhere, although I don’t know of any brand that makes that process easy anymore
Well, Pixel still unlocks freely.
Assuming you dont get the phone through your carrier
can we use Google Wallet to tap pay with an unlocked bootloader?
I do with my Pixel 7 Pro. You need Magisk + Play Integrity Fix by Chiteroman at the moment.
yeah, on previous phones I played cat-and-mouse with magisk and all kind of patch to have Wallet work, but it breaks every 2 or 3 weeks and you have to chase down how to re-fix it…
It’s slightly more reliable right now, but for sure, it’s going to be cat-and-mouse for awhile at least. Google is phasing out legacy Play Integrity checks, and while it looked like there was no future for workarounds after they deprecated legacy methods, now at least it looks like the community has replicated a functional full keybox attestation chain so there’s hope we can continue to workaround indefinitely into the future.
So yes, while you don’t need to program your own solution and can just - in the end - install a pre-built fix still, it takes attention to keep up. If the above all sounds like gibberish, it’s a good indication of the level of commitment you have to have to keep up with it. For me, it’s worth it, but definitely understand, it gets tiresome.
Pixel devices are trivially easy to unlock
Pixel or OnePlus
OnePlus phones have green lines on screen and damaging motherboard issues.
Heard about this too I believe this was mostly an issue in India because of their slightly different models?
Seems like it.
I’ve had the OnePlus 6 and the OnePlus Nord N200 and I’ve not seen those things occur but thanks for the information.
Those are prehistoric phones in no way relevant to this discussion
The nord n200 is 2021
although I don’t know of any brand that makes that process easy anymore
https://github.com/melontini/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame#ℹ️-safe-for-now-trollface
Agreed, the official process was a massive pain and borderline non functional.
My Fairphone 5 was easy to unlock.
So far I couldn’t unlock the bootloader because whenever I add a number it tells me to try again tomorrow
They have already practically ended it. The official process makes the user jump through so many hoops - registering account, using it for 30 days (!!!), installing their app, begging for unlock through it, getting random errors which the official support refuses to explain (!!!) and only after that having the chance to try to hit the daily unlock request window which lasts less than one minute each day (!!!) - that it is practically non existent. Fuck the fucking fuckers.
having the chance to try to hit the daily unlock request window which lasts less than one minute each day (!!!)
Holy shit, are you serious? Can you elaborate on how does that work? You get an email saying you can do that between 3:27:15 PM and 3:27:50 PM or something?
No, it’s the same minute every day, for everyone in the world. 0:00 GMT+8
Oh, ok. Still crazy though.
GMT is subject to DST. You sure it isn’t UTC?
I don’t think the GMT time zone ever changes. Some countries going in and out of GMT but the GMT hour never changes forwards or backwards
We do, twice a year and it annoys me no end since I work some shitty continental hours and sometimes have to watch the clock go backwards through the night.
Well this is how the app states it. It resolves to this: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0%3A00+GMT%2B8
Return it
Unfortunately not easy in my country - only for repeated warranty claims.
The source on this is one guy from X (formerly Twitter), from Vietnam.
I mean, it sound plausible and expected, but it’s not some official news.
Cool.
My country has limited choice in phone OEMs. Soon the only unlockable choice will be Motorola.
And when they too stop allowing it, I guess I can go fuck myself🖕The hell is the point of putting more powerful silicon in the damn things if they’ll just keep restricting what you can do with them more and more each year?
I fucking hate tech companies, man.
Member back when you used to be optimistic about the upcoming innovation? Now the only “innovation” is enshitification.
The point of more power technology is to easily control their users more. The days of having “open” phones died with Nexus
I’m fragmenting my devices more and more.
I recently bought a cheap mp3 player, quit streaming, found new piracy routes for music, back to basics. Still use Spotify for browsing and finding new bands. All good.
I use a kindle and read ebooks a lot.
At the rate phones are going, I’ll have a digital camera and a dumb phone soon.
Exactly
If that’s true, the temperature in the frog’s pan goes up a little more… soon, we will lose all freedom in the mobile world :(
Perhaps for the best, the sooner we stop using those pieces of shit, the sooner we’ll regain a bit of control of our own lives
The real goal that the community should be working on is to strengthen the political efforts to give people the rights to do whatever they want with phones they PURCHASE, and prohibit manufacturers from locking them down so the OWNER can’t make any changes. I would totally accept that it voids the warranty because they can’t cover all the bricked devices that result from reckless modding… but there should not be allowed any barriers between the OWNER and the software within.
And the reason for my emphasis of certain words is that the corporate world is really truly beginning to indulge the delusion that nobody ever owns anything and that purchases consumers make are merely the manufacturer granting them the privilege of indefinite loan. It all needs to stop hard and now.
Xiaomi was the only manufacturer I recently kept buying my “new flagship every 3 years”. If it is not possible to unlock, I’m out. I guess a Pixel will be my choice. The only thing keeping me away from Pixel were the low performance CPUs.
Pixel cpu is embarrassing though. Very low performance, and they somehow manage to convince the press it’s fine by saying it’s AI optimized. Wtf…
To 99% of people, battery life matters much more than it being 8% faster compared to last year’s model. Though it can be argued that the pixel’s efficiency sucks and that it affects the battery life significantly. For example on my phone I would gladly use the low power mode that reduces the cpu perf to about 70%, except it also forces the display to go to 60hz
Yeah that’s true, but it’s supposed to be a top model if you look at the insane price. So what do you actually get for that money then? I don’t know what they are the best at, and also the camera housing is very ugly.
Fair point, it should get better for the pixel 10 though because iirc they will be switching to TSMC from Samsung foundry
The performance may not be on par with other Flagships Socs. But, it can be considered a decent upper midrange flagship smartphone. The pixel phones after Pixel 8 are decent and do not have the bad heating issues of the past Pixel generations.
ASUS did this recently & lost a lawsuit in the UK for lying to customers to say unlock servers were only temporarily down for a couple months (lol)
Glad I didn’t buy a zenfone, looked like a great option but that sucks
I had it in my cart & went to double-check nothing changed about unlocking… happy I took a step back
It is wretched that you have to maintain constant vigilance on this bullshit, though.
Remember when phones just came unlocked out of the box? You could just flash whatever you wanted on day 1 and without any data loss
Interesting. I hadn’t heard about this. I got this response from Xiaomi earlier today after complaining they mis-sold me a phone as their unique selling point was the ability to unlock the bootloader.
“We hope you could understand, that such an operation will disable some of the built-in security features of the system, and those security features are part of what keeps the operating system safe and your data secure from exposure or corruption. And this misuse will void your phone’s warranty and it may render your phone useless depending on the security measures in place on your phone.”
What a shame. I don’t get why they would do that. Didn’t I pay for the phone?
That’s the problem. You paid only once. The companies want you to pay indefinitely. And if they control your OS, well, they can shove ads or broatware into your face all they wish gaining more revenue.
Okay. I’m not buying it then
Not to mention both phones and TVs are crazy expensive to manufacturer. They can’t effectively sell a device at a reasonable price so they make it cheaper and make up for it elsewhere
There is money to be had
Another words they want to harvest your data
Anyway I am still rocking a 2019 phone with Lineage OS and it works pretty well. Used phones are where its at these days. Hold on to your working device until it dies.
Still got my phone from 2020, I really like the phone but the software is creaking, even the custom ROM I moved to is now discontinued and no Lineage available.
I looked at porting something myself but it is … not trivial to say the least.
Just feels frustrating that the phone still works fine but is gradually losing functionality and I can’t update it. Also ngl I really miss having contactless payments. I’ve tried all the fixes I can find online with no success.
It was a matter of time. We really need a good(or at least better) company to step up and make a phone. A framework phone would be fire but its gonna take years if they wanna fo it.
Motorola is pretty good or at least my current older device is solid
Sony still welcomes unlocking without anything special—you get a headphone jack & microSD too.
I feel like I’m limited to pixel phones since they’re the only widely available phone that doesn’t void the warranty for unlocking the bootloader. I haven’t tried roms in a few years but I like having that choice. Fairphones can be a little hard to get. Are there other options? Lineage support would be ideal.
I’ve been using Pixels for a while and I’ve been perfectly happy.
Well, except for my 6 having a green tint to the screen, but that was fixed in a software update a while back.
I don’t have any complaints with the 6 either other than the fingerprint reader being a downgrade compared to older models. I don’t plan to upgrade until the 10/10a with a TSMC tensor and hopefully major improvements in performance and efficiency. Would be nice to have more choices without sacrificing this admittedly obscure principle.
There is also Shiftphone. The 8 model is supposed to come out in january 25. They explicitly support custom roms.
If they stick with a Samsung manufactured 750G, it’ll be limited to the low end market. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s not really an option for the western mid to high end market.
No, they will use a 778G.
Why do you think a slower processor would be a no-go? Are there so much people who care for that? Apart from smartphone gaming (which I find really stupid), this shouldn’t really matter.
I think we can agree that most people will never need anything more than a midrange processor for average use and only overbuy due to marketing.
Speaking only for myself, I’ve become accustomed to the snappiness of higher end processors and high refresh screens. All the screens I use on a daily basis are 120hz+ and even though I don’t game on my phone, the benefits of having a high refresh rate screen has become a nice quality of life feature for me. I still have a 60hz phone that I test as a degoogled phone and the difference is quite noticeable.
A high-end processor helps drive apps at those higher refresh rates and also just as important, it can brute-force some of the less-than-well optimized open source apps I rely on to interact with my self-hosted infrastructure.
I can live with a lower-end phone but I’m willing to pay a bit more for features and performance that meet my standards.
My current phone is an F5. One of my worst Android experiences has been this phone before I put a different ROM. Never would buy another one without being able to unlock the bootloader.
i miss the early 2010s
Bought a Pocophone F1 when that had insane value per dollar. Had to “wait” for a cooldown period to unlock the bootloader. I had never bought phones made for a Chinese market before. I have never felt more disrespected by a phone company, forcing me to use their launcher for 2 weeks, so condescending. I am a functioning human adult, thank you very much, I’ll chose my own software. Never interested in made for Chinese market phones again.
