Era of tinkering, customization for better privacy ,performance is end,each day there less and less phone vendors which let to unlock bootladers,now we left with oneplus,google pixel and xiaomi with 9 circles of hell to unlock it
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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Android
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Fairphone
Also Sony, their open device program is pretty sweet.
Asus is good too
Edit: not any more
They don't let you anymore, do they? There was a whole controversy about the Zenfone 12
Zenfone 10 already doesn't unlock.
Source: got a zf10, thinking i can unlock it, because they were "rereleasing their unlock tool, any moment now" -_-
Oh i didn't know about that, i bought a zf9 a few years ago, how unfortunate i know they also dropped a bunch of features and crammed a ton of ai garbage on it so i paid it little mind.
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Just waiting for the pain to be enough to switch to Linux on a phone.
Main drawbacks right now:
- I have one health-related (open source) app that I NEED to work flawlessly
- Navigating the various UIs seems incredibly awkward and inconsistent
Have you checked SailfishOS? Their Android-bridge is pretty decent, it might work well. If you tell me the app name, I can check whether it works or not.
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There haven't been any roms for OnePlus phones in a few years since they stopped publishing the MSM tool for new phones. Iirc, the 9 was their last phone to truly support custom roms.
Apparently the MSM tool was leaked for the 11, so there are a couple roms for it. But the old OnePlus and their community is unfortunately long dead.
I am sorry to hear that then :(
Motorola is pretty solid from a bootloader unlock perspective. It is dead simple and some devices support relocking with custom keys.
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But at least this time it secures the phone against cellebrite & other hacking tools, right? ...right?
(for those unaware: there are tools built by cellebrite and other companies that can dump the internal storage of your phone and decrypt its contents without your consent. they're in use by most police in the US at least, probably other countries as well and definitely airports. They can hack just about every single phone, except for maybe the newest iphone with a really long pin and advanced protection enabled, and recent google pixels with grapheneos.)
What's the proof ?
Wow this is amazing
Cellebrite was used to crack the first Trump shooter's phone. At the time, they openly talked about the latest iPhone being uncrackable and still in the "In Research" phase. So if the shooter had one, they'd have been screwed.
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They sell a lot of copies of the software for it not to work.
Ugh. Samsung already has the worst, most intrusive Android UI. This reinforces my determination to never give them another cent...
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BREAKING
1st they removed the sdcard from the A56, now this.
Except updates there are even lesser reasons to consider samsung. Especially, when chinese OEMs beat them in the hardware game.
They were set on doing it when Knox was first introduced anyway.
Normies donβt give a shit anyway as they see it as a necessary step in securing their own lack of understanding of anything technology, besides brainrot and doomscrolling.
Thanks for the reminder of why I stopped caring about Samsung phones 10 years ago.
Google needs to get their shit together and put an actually competitive chip in their phones. Iβm not buying a late cycle phone with a tensor processor that canβt even match the current snapdragon or A-series.
Google is busy locking android down to remove any freedom of choice.
nah they want it to be AI/tensor, thats why i went with oneplus instead.
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Hasn't been unlockable for the past... 5 years? In the US at least. (Bought directly from samsung.com)
Samsung only had locked bootloader in the US market because of the carrier mafias in the US having wayyyy more power than they should have, even over OEMs. They can't charge you extra for basic features if you can bypass the artificial locks with root empowered tools, or shove adware/bloatware down your throat if you can remove them, can they?
All other market's models always had unlocked bootloader, even their China/Hong Kong and EU models. Although it's still not entirely open because Samsung have extremely customized ROM, that also have Samsung's security suite Knox and Samsung Pay deeply integrated all over the place, where a lot of encryption and obfuscation were included, because they are purpose designed security solutions. So with bootloader unlock you are still going to lose a lot of core OS features (even if you don't actually mod the boot image to have root access, and just have the bootloader unlocked), there are tools that can restore some, but not all features can be restored.
Well that is, until now, apparently.
But then, on the other hand, Samsung devices are the closest you can get to Apple's ridiculous walled garden in the Android ecosystem, so you'd you ever want that nonsense anyway lol
I have a S24 because it is the smallest phone on the market that year. Can someone please make a small Android phone. I am running out of options π
BREAKING!
can't stand when this is in a headline lol
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