- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.ml
- android@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.ml
- android@programming.dev
“OnePlus has announced a new system that limits who can unlock the bootloader on their phones. Stating reasons such as “data security” and an enhanced “system stability” […]. OnePlus has introduced a new procedure where anyone wanting to unlock the bootloader on their devices must first fill out an online request form for “Deep Testing””.
Even if it is for one region, it is still enshitification preventing phones to have custom ROM 🤦♂️
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They lived long enough to become the villain
They got purchased by Oppo
They were always an oppo spinoff, and after capturing their customer base they got spun back in. I hate corporations.
Fucking fantastic. /s. This is probably the first step to killing bootloader unlocking entirely and that could be a real problem because to the best of my knowledge that would leave Google and maybe Fairphone as the only two possibilities in existence until Graphene launches a device
- “requirements are only applicable to users in China”
- “restrictions will not apply to previous versions of ColorOS” (<16)
- “unlocking the bootloader won’t void the phone’s warranty”
While not ideal, it’s also not the end of the world.
Hopefully this is as far as it goes and not something they will continually restrict each year. This feels similar to the Xiaomi situation which seems to have had the same problems in China, and they have gradually restricted unlocking more and more.
Boooooo, not cool!!
Adding OnePlus to my blacklist, next to Samsung.
Any others I need to add?
Xiaomi recently blocked bootloader unlocking and even before that it was a convolute process were you made a request using a app of theirs and had to wait one week before the phone was unlocked.
- Asus disabled the option to unlock the bootloader.
- Huawei
this is garbage and backwards
Is Daddy Google making them do this under the excuse of “data security”? It’s a bit sus that they’ve all “decided” to do it of their own volition.
Plus Google has locked a bunch of stuff out of the open source versions now, so it’s likely only a matter of time before it’s effectively useless.
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I just stopped buying Android devices. Now I inherit old ones that other people would have thrown out. They are ok if you didn’t pay for it.
The CCP does not want people running things like GrapheneOS, so this is not surprising.
I don’t know much about hacking, but it’s surprising to me that there’s not a way to get around this. What stops people from developing a forced workaround? What would need to be done to develop one?
Edit: Answering my own question, sort of, it seems that a locked bootloader uses cryptographic keys stored on the device, so the problem becomes a typical key brute forcing scenario. What a mess. It’s so annoying that there aren’t more “touchscreen handheld computers” where you can just install whatever you want on them the same as building your own PC. I hate how everything like that is being chipped away over time.
Stuff like this seems promising though in a very far-out, push-comes-to-shove kind of way: https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/how-to-voltage-fault-injection#protect
There’s also the fact that if you did crack the encryption, they would pull a Nintendo and sue you for it. Modifying your own devices is still not technically legal in most of the US, and I imagine corporate money keeps it that way in much of the rest of the world as well.
