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.
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.
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.
So far I couldn’t unlock the bootloader because whenever I add a number it tells me to try again tomorrow
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.
The point of more power technology is to easily control their users more. The days of having “open” phones died with Nexus
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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
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Sad to hear
Xiaomi can suck my balls, the very first automatic updates they force on a new phone is the stuff that sticks advertise EVERY. FUCKING. WHERE. Gallery? Have some ads. Settings? Get yo ads! Calculator? ADS ADS ADS! I can’t tell whether they’re on par or worse than Samsung with stupid bloat, data harvesting and ads everywhere. The fucking phones are also infuriatingly condescending, treating you like a dumb toddler, showing warnings about “daaaaangeroooooooous” actions you might be doing and putting 30s timers before you can hit “LET ME FUCKING CONTINUE”
Unlocking the bootloader is such a hassle, too, I gave up and used ADB Bridge to uninstall some of the bloatware to make my experience less insufferable.
When I was trying to unlock the bootloader, Mi flash tool told me there’s an update (v7.?) and gave me the link to download the newer version, when I tried to download it every browser I used gave an error in the website even with VPN Now reading this news , even if it’s still unofficial… I was wondering if Xiaomi retracted the update because it’s actually preparing to close the program
So that’s why unlocking the bootloader on my dad’s phone doesn’t work. This really sucks, I hope there’s some other way to do it because HyperOS is straight ass.
You could look for a hardware vulnerability. I doubt they would be so careless but you never know.
Based on how much HyperOS (and the fucking name) sucks, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finds a way to unlock the bootloader. I really hope someone does soon because I really don’t want my dad to continue getting tortured by having to use it.
Does it require a code to unlock? You could brute force the code
The way it works is that you need a proprietary app (in the past it was on PC and you had to connect the phone over USB, now it’s an app on the phone) where you log in with the Xiaomi Account that is also logged in on your phone. Then you “request” a bootloader unlock and after a week or so you can do the same thing again and it unlocks the bootloader. My guess would be that it uses encryption on the phone in some way and the server sends the decryption key. I also just thought that the process is so tedious that someone should have come up with a way to circumvent it already but maybe no one wanted to invest the time since it was possible that way. Either way, I don’t have experience with this kind of thing, so I’m not really the person to figure it out.
I’ve decided a long time ago I won’t buy Xiaomi phone again unless it’s my only choice… if that’s true then it’s no more a choice Anybody knows what are OnePlus and Oppo polices with unlocking bootloader ?
