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Huawei Will No Longer Allow Bootloader Unlocking On Its Android Handsets (androidauthority.com)
Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has long made it easier for users to unlock the bootloader on its phones. But that is changing now. Android Authority: Earlier this month a support page, which detailed ways to unlock a bootloader, disappeared without any explanation from the company's websites. In a statement, the company said, "In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and risk of data being compromised, Huawei will cease providing bootloader unlock codes for devices launched after May 25, 2018." It added, "For devices launched prior to the aforementioned date, the termination of the bootloader code application service will come into effect 60 days after today's announcement. Moving forward, Huawei remains committed to providing quality services and experiences to its customers. Thank you for your continued support."
I am against the government getting involved in most aspects of our lives, but this is flat out a case where government intervention is needed,
If a phone can't be unlocked so I can install whatever OS I want, then it should not be allowed to be imported into the USA.
This includes the iPhone...
If I pay $3000 for a top of the line laptop, I can install whatever OS I want. It may not work perfectly, but that is on me. If I pay $300 for a bottom basement laptop, I can still install whatever OS I want.
This has GOT to change with phones as well.
They try to give some bullshit about how it is to protect the network, but that is a load of horseshit.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
Lineage OS? Or any of a dozen other smaller specialised distros?
Huawei has been positioning itself as a higher quality smartphone brand than the rest of the Chinese competition, but fails at it entirely. It is, however, worse value than all other Chinese brands.
I don't care one way or the other as I have standardized our family on the same model Samsung Galaxy phones (so we can swap batteries and other accessories among us), but from time to time I look into the Chinese brands like OnePlus, Alcatel/TCL, Oppo, Lenovo (though this is partly a Taiwanese brand from a technological POV). Huawei makes just OK phones which have an incredibly uninspiring value.
I guess they have even more delusions of greatness now, as they think they should stop people from using their phones as they like (like Apple).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"Thank you for your continued support."
There is no support. I don't have much influence in the phone world, but all that I have will now be directed at convincing people away from you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And 9-11 was a libtard job, duh! ae911truth org
I won't be sad when the current round of political stupidity ends.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It certainly wouldn't be the first time a government used a "national security" blanket excuse to covertly force something down a company's gullet.
Yeah, but a whole new one usually starts right after.
I am very pleased that major U.S. carriers were pressured to dump you. The unlockable bootloaders were likely a ploy anyway. ZTE has given us reason to spurn these products.
PostmarketOS.
I'd like to add that networks are built on the common property of wireless airspace. We have granted the government the authority to license the access to the airspace, which the carriers must pay to use. The carriers benefit from something that belongs to the people, and they can continue as long as they operate in a way mutually beneficial way. But careful oversight and regulation of a business using a common property is important to insure that their behavior remains in the public's interests.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It kinda sounded like "You don't want to buy our stuff. You want to buy stuff from someone who isn't going to place limits on you doing what you want with your own device."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This sort of self contradictory reporting bugs me a lot more than it probably should....
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
"In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and risk of data being compromised, ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And 9-11 was a libtard job, duh! ae911truth org
I won't be sad when the current round of political stupidity ends.
The heat death of the universe is a long time to wait.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Goodbye Huawei, was nice knowing you for the two devices I had, no more.
They lock if you buy the phone through them. Do what I did and pay more for an unlocked phone. You hear that? Stop being cheap and pay MORE for an unlocked phone which puts it closer to the MSRP.
Idiot much? We're talking about the bootloader not carrier lock. But hey, this is /., we don't RTFA.
I wasn't impressed when the government told me to avoid them, but now Huawei itself is telling me to avoid them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You have no idea indeed. That CPU is supported does not mean that you can run the OS on it because in embedded device world all the chipsets and all are variety of different incompatible ones. "provided proper driver support" is real hard to come by. So no, theoretically ARM OS won't run on any ARM devices. You might have different meaning to "theoretically" from others.
Normally I'm against regulation of technology (in general), but here's a case where we, the people, genuinely need the government to step in. It should be illegal to manufacture, import, or offer for sale any device which contains anti-freedom provisions such as bootloader locking or anti-root measures.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
provided proper driver support
That's the problem.
It's not just driver support either, it's board support. The same components can be put together in different ways, requiring different configuration of the drivers for different devices.
There's no standard "plug and play" system to auto-detect all the connected hardware for these systems either, you end up needing a custom device tree for every variation of every device, which specified which drivers to load, what memory addresses are required to access them, which GPIO pins control them, etc.
It's like PC's were back in the ISA slot days, except they all had a standard BIOS to boot the computer to a usable state.
All the different SoC manufacturers have different boot processes too. Some of them are absolutely horrible like the Broadcom chips in the Raspberry Pi, where the main processor is the proprietary video core and the ARM CPU is just a co-processor.
Different devices with the same SoC might need different boot code too, as the storage could be on the eMMC port, MMC0, MMC1, USB, SATA, PCIe, etc.
You can't just probe all of them, or you'll end up with someone booting malware from the SD card they inserted.
It seems like finding something with an unlockable bootloader is virtually impossible these days.
What companies actually allow it still? HTC is the only one I know.
Kinda sounds like "You want to buy the shiniest newest device every year after throwing away your old one and you don't care about bootloaders. If you do, you're in the minority that won't affect sales."
Follow the $ is often correct. A reason they lock is entitled assholes flash wrong stuff and expect free support. This is a major reason we can't have more nice things. The entitled spoil it for those who are responsible.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
They wanted to prevent people plugging modems into the phone lines: 4800 baud half-duplex was available from them and only them, and that's all anyone could ever need, so there!
davecb@spamcop.net
You know Librem 5 doesn't actually exist now eh?
You can pre-order a development kit....
By the time it gets produced (if it ever does) it's going to be a low to mid range phone performance wise, with an iMX8m cpu. They should have stuck with the iMX8.
It's a basic 1.5GHz quad core A53 CPU, like mid range phones from 3 years ago - the Moto G from 2015 has a quad core 1.4GHz A53. The iMX8 on the other hand has another 2 A72 cores.
It'll probably have shit battery life too, as the iMX series aren't designed for phones. Tablets would be the thing with the smallest battery they're designed for.
It's already obsolete in terms of hardware capability and it's still in development with no end-date in sight.
It's a nice concept though.
I have consistently purchased Google Nexus phones because I can unlock them if they aren't. I also want alternative operating systems not necessarily Android. Ubuntu Touch on my Nexus 5 from the ubports has been a good experience for me lately athough sometimes I do miss all those other apps around in the Google Play Store. I was actually considering to buy a Huawei Android phone for my next purchase because they are feature-full.
If I cannot unlock my potential phone, that implies I won't be purchasing said phone. I guess I'll be sticking to those phones that are directly supported from Google either Pixel 2 or Pixel 3.
We allowed to install custom ROMS til now for less stuttering and better battery life, but Chinese Government wants to spy and custom ROMS don't have the government software.
We sorry, please use us!
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Your refrigerator? your car? your pacemaker? Do those manufacturers have to support third-party SW modding? Who draws the line?
There's a CPU in everything--should the manufacturers for every programmable device be required to enable third-party SW on that device? It's easier than you think to cause real physical harm if we let /. Java-monkeys re-write critical pieces of firmware on embedded devices; and it would cost a lot of money and effort to put in physical hardware safeguards to protect the world from the zombie hoard of self-satisfied ass-clowns that hang out on this forum.
...because it points out the fundamental problem that no one here is talking about. The fraction of people who care about rooting their phone is statistically insignificant. If there was a market there, then companies would try to fill that void (it's not that hard to make a smartphone nowadays).
Just like if there was a market for a brick-sized phone with 2 weeks of battery life using replaceable batteries, 3 headphone jacks, no FaceID or fingerprint sensor, 4 different kinds of memory slots, and full circa-2003 Flash support, then somebody would build that phone.
Instead the hacker crowd talks about "freedom" and "sheeple" when what they really mean is, "please force everyone to subsidize my nerdy little hobby--and please make technology hard to use again so that my existence is justified and normal people are forced to talk to me occasionally."
If you're that worried about it then you should start a campaign to educate people about it
Was DDT banned due to lots of people voicing their opinions on it ? Or was it banned undemocratically, with a mandate from powers that be ?
About technical matters, where the populace is not expected to understand the implications of their choice, how are decisions taken in your world ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
didn't know apple offered a 8 core 5ghz option. might give it a try, where can i buy?
Who is liable when somebody rewrites your pacemaker software and kills you? Or burns your house down when they rewrite the software on the microwave? I guarantee the same people on this forum who are insisting on more freedom will be the first people to line up and sue they manufacturer when they cause some real physical damage by modding the device, "but, but, there should have been hardware interlocks preventing me from doing any real damage".
Because they want to be able to get back into the market in a couple of years?
As many years as I care to merge them into the branch for my device and recompile. If I could find a phone that lasted longer than a couple years without some piece of hardware going out I'd care more.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
it's no longer an option now.
they even have their own GUI upon Android (MUI).
if i can't flash it and run a standard Android, no thanks
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.