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.

Boo

Adding OnePlus to my blacklist, next to Samsung.

Any others I need to add?

They lived long enough to become the villain

I will limit my purchases of OnePlus equipment.

• "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.

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.

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

We should use the term "licensing" a phone over "buying". Because this shit ain't buying if I am, the device owner, can't do shit they want to their phone cuz random big companies needs to protect the apps (aka spyware) from users.

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

Boooooo, not cool!!

I had the 5 but really everything after 1 was aafter they had become just as bullshit as the competition

As someone who just tried daily driving a non-unlocked phone for the first time in 10+ years, I'm interested in seeing some development in the direction of sandboxing. Not sure how stuff works in GrapheneOS for example (haven't tried it) and haven't delved into too much details of AOSP either, but I think it makes sense - make sure that system and sensitive apps are not possible to tamper with even if you want to, and run everything else in a separate space that you can have root access to. Would be nice, although realistically I don't see this happening outside of some developer-focused device.

But yeah, even if I don't want to unlock, I'd prefer having the peace of mind that I can if I decide to. Haven't tried OnePlus so far, and this here makes is much less likely that I would in the future.

They are going out of business and should be considered compromised by piracy. Buying a One Plus is supporting a global criminal organization.