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Chinese Phone Maker Huawei Risks Alienating Its Loyal Customer Base By Taking a Strong Stand Against Unlocking of Its Handsets, Users Say (irishtech.ie)
A post on Irish technology news blog, which criticizes the recent works of the world's second largest smartphone maker Huawei, is being widely circulated across several Android communities, with most people agreeing with the concerns raised in the post. From the story: Huawei is the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, falling second only to Samsung having recently overtaken Apple. They're huge in Ireland and across the globe. As a company, they have done a number of great things for both the enthusiast and the general user alike, but amidst privacy concerns the company has started to lash out at the community which helped get it (and especially its sub-brand Honor) off of the ground. Not only have they begun to block users from unlocking the devices which they've paid for, they are now looking to make users return their already unlocked devices to their normal state, according to numerous reports on the forums of XDA-Developers and well known Magisk developer topjohnwu. "I am informed that a new Huawei OTA will render Magisk-installed devices from booting," the developer wrote. Magisk is a popular "root" solution used which gives a user access to their device's system files.
Huawei was huge with the development community for a number of reasons, no less because their devices were some of the easiest to unlock out of all of the major manufacturers. You simply applied for your key online and promptly received it. It was a rather painless system, which allowed you to then install what's known as a "custom ROM". A custom ROM is simply just a custom version of Android, free from all of the included pre-installed applications from Huawei. They often run better too, again because of the lack of bloat.
Huawei was huge with the development community for a number of reasons, no less because their devices were some of the easiest to unlock out of all of the major manufacturers. You simply applied for your key online and promptly received it. It was a rather painless system, which allowed you to then install what's known as a "custom ROM". A custom ROM is simply just a custom version of Android, free from all of the included pre-installed applications from Huawei. They often run better too, again because of the lack of bloat.
they don't want you to load a firmware doesn't have the pre-installed spyware and exploits that their government wants on the devices.
the irony here is the company has been hacking, reverse engineering and copying foreign products since its founding.
“Helped get it off the ground”? No way. For Huawei to rival Samsung in sales, 99.9% of those sales were to clueless users, who would not even know what custom ROM is, and had no desire to load one. These users buy a new phone every 1-3 years.
As all the game console maker learned from PS3 boot other OS feature, and what Apple already knew, techies made up less than 0.01% of their target market. Catering for them made no business sense, and very likely cause loads of headache. Instead of bringing in more customers, they are more likely to break your system and threaten your business model. Better to shut them out right from the start.
These techies do like to overrate their own importance and like to claim their friends look to them for recommendations. Maybe that would influence 0.1% of the users, the remaining 99.9% buy whichever phone looked best at a price they can afford.
They are the second biggest phone manufacturer.
They shipped 150m phones in 2017 and are going to ship 200m phones in 2018.
XDA has a total of 6.6m users in total. Lets ignore that most of those users are inactive, and that most of them won't be about huawei phones. Lets also assume people buy a phone every 2 years.
That means that, in a completely ridiculous use case which we know is overblown, under %2 of their user base will be effected.
It's more likely well under %0.01 of their actual handsets.
> Only .001% of customers unlock their handsets.
Maybe, but that 0.001% has tremendous influence on the purchasing decisions of OTHERS. Who do people looking for a new phone ask for advice? The 0.001% who root & reflash their phones. If THOSE users think Huawei is now the devil & tell everyone who asks for advice that Huawei phones suck, they're unlikely to buy Huawei phones.
Think back to how quickly Nokia went from #1 worldwide to "basically irrelevant". What happened? They made a business decision to ignore the US market since American GSM was a hot mess (T-mobile barely had enough spectrum to do 2G GSM with 19.2kbps GPRS data in most US markets, most of AT&T's high(er)-speed data was EDGE, not 3G, and AT&T's 3G was 850MHz, not 1900/2150MHz), and they didn't sell many phones in the US anyway compared to even small countries like Portugal & Ireland.
What Nokia overlooked was mindshare & influence. America might have been a minor market, but it was a hugely INFLUENTIAL market. When Nokia phones disappeared from American stores, Nokia phones ALSO disappeared from the blogsphere, magazines, and review sites (the majority of which at the time were, in fact, American). The fact that the few Nokia phones that occasionally showed up as expensive imports in places like New York & Miami (intended mostly for foreign visitors to buy while on vacation & take home) were almost USELESS in the US just made matters worse, and got them written off as 'irrelevant' by even more American tech writers. (True story: ~10 years ago, Nokia had a store in Miami at Dadeland Mall whose primary market was visitors from Latin America. Every single one of their employees had non-Nokia phones for personal use, because they literally didn't have a single Nokia phone in the entire store that was capable of EDGE on ANY network, or 3G on AT&T. They were "1900/2150 3G + GPRS, take it or leave it" (and everyone who lived in Miami opted for "leave it").
I have always bought my Android Phones direct from Manufacturer. I have a BLU Studio 5.0. An R1 HD, and a Vivo 5, which is my current daily driver.
The Studio 5.0C I have has no custom Rom for it. I use a modified Stock Rom with Root+XPrivacy. I do have TWRP installed. It runs Android KitKat. It never had a locked bootloader. GAPPS Removed.
The R1 HD Has several Custom Roms. I had to use a Bootloader exploit to unlock the Bootloader, and Flash TWRP, then Flash only Rom where all the hardware works. Which is LineageOS 13.1 (Android Marshmellow.). GAPPS was not included.
There are LineageOS 14.1 Roms for the R1 HD, they work pretty well, but, not if you want the camera to work.
it's a problem with the drivers built into the kernel. We don't have the sources, and never will. The only option is to reverse engineer the binaries, but the amount of work required has caused pretty much everyone to abandon this phone.
And that brings us too:
The Vivo 5. I had to do some really risky stuff to get this thing's bootloader unlocked using SP Flash tools. But I got it, and I now run LineageOS 14.1 Android Nougat 7.1.2 and all the hardware works, I have full root control, and no GAPPS Even through there is other Android Nougat roms, there is no Oreo Rom. Which has me worried.
I bet that they are member of the Google android manufacturer club or whatever name they use like Open Hanset Alliance. There were a number of articles documenting Google trend to reduce Android fragmentation. It leads them to go away from the open source philosophy and values.
I bet that Huawei is simply caving on this pressure with the same effect on the open source side.
If nerds had such influence, then Linux would have gotten more power in the desktop and Windows 10 would have failed.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Xiaomi phones are a good alternative. They come with a locked bootloader BUT Xiaomi has an easy process to get them unlocked and install custom roms.
Plus they are very good quality and not expensive. Tons of features. And they usually have bigger batteries thus more standby.
I had the Huawei Nexus 6P.
It was a great phone and always had the latest and greatest Android version running. Sadly, it was very slippery and I dropped it one too many times..the last one into the pool and I was never able to fully repair it.
I liked that phone so much that I replaced it with a P20 pro.
Boy, do I regret it.
Compared to the 6P, it is a dumpster fire on a hot Texas summer day.
It never occurred to me that Huawei would break so many stock Android features with their ridiculous EMUI.
Want to interact with a notification from the lock screen? Nope, cannot do it.
Want to pull down the top menu to enable or disable wifi from the lock screen? Nope, cannot do it.
Want to select a wifi network directly from the pull down menu without going to wifi settings? Nope, cannot do it.
Dismiss alarm from lock screen? Nope, cannot do it.
Want the huawei clock alarm to sound during quiet hours? Nope, cannot do it.
Want the google google clock alarms to work for more than 2 days without the need to turn on and off the alarm? Nope, cannot do it.
Want to use a cellular data connection WHILE your phone is camped on a wifi network which has no data connection? Nope, cannot do it. The phone will NOT use cellular even though wifi data is impossible.
Want to double click power button to turn on camera? Nope, cannot do it. You can use the volume down button though.
Want to use the volume double press to turn on the camera whilst listening to audio or in a call? Nope, cannot do it.
Want to fully disable the insane beautify mode for selfies? Nope, cannot do it.
It goes on and on and on.
This is really the first phone that I genuinely regret getting.
The only good thing is the battery life. Of course, the phone is so fucking slow, it's no small wonder the battery lasts two days.
What Nokia overlooked was mindshare & influence. America might have been a minor market, but it was a hugely INFLUENTIAL market.
Huh... nope.
The reason behind the downfall of Nokia is that basically Elop and Microsoft happened to them.
Who did a tons of horribly bad decision that dragged down Nokia.
There are some people who have written at great lenght analyzing the subject. (Basically, Nokia disappeared from the carrier's own store due to making tons of bad decisions that alienated them, and that's the reason they disappeared from the US market. They also completely neglected the market where they were dominant and thus got their lunch eaten by cheap chinese android nonames).
It's also sweet that you think that just what a few bloggers speak about in the US will have such a big influence world-wide (though it partially happens around Apple and feature that get copied from them).
Do you think that companies pop from the ground like mushrooms ? One of the reasons that companies like Huawei have managed to become dominant is that they had build momentum taking over other markets. They became popular in countries looking for cheap Android phone. They have built manufacturing capacity, they have worked through the various kinks of early model and have an actual offering by the time they seek to replace a vacant niche in the US market.
They are the manufacturer who are already pushing shit tons of phones through aliexpress unto BRICS countries.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have been using android and custom ROMs since the HTC magic (the first android device you could buy here).
I have a P20 pro, bought it because you could unlock it, and lineage OS would run on it, and on top you could still use the stock Huawei camera app. This gives me best of both worlds, the device and the camera is fantastic, but the software is horrible (I tried to use it for 1 week before giving up):
* they implemented some kind of process freezing that makes you lose notifications (I had this with hangouts, google photos, facebook messenger and more). Major dealbrearker, you can somehow exempt some apps from the freezing but that's very involved
* I got a call from my girlfriend with phone in priority only. Phone din't ring. She was not amused (we have twins and needed to come asap)
* you can not set the SMS ringtone to something else than the default notification sound (mind, this is with google's messages app, somehow they didn't implement the notification channels correctly)
* bluetooth is buggy, strangely works better in custom ROMs
* it's slow
* contains lots of bloatware
* if you want to use Google apps like calendar and contacts, you get lots of duplication, and confusion resulting from that (it will always open Huawei calendar)
Now running a project treble ROM and loving it. There are a few drawbacks, IR doesn't work, USB audio doesn't work, in call mute doesn't work, no notch support, but none of these are bigger issues than their own EMUI rubbish.
And as stated already here, people often come to me for buying advice for android phones, I will NOT recommend Huawei ever.
Unfortunately, Sony shot themselves in the foot when they started wiping the camera DRM keys after unlocking their device. And so did Samsung when they implemented KNOX on all their devices. Both those manufacturers basically tell their customers that they are allowed to unlock their phones by permanently handicapping them.
Because you're wrong. You're referring to carrier ("SIM") locking. On Android phones, there's also bootloader locking, which prevents installation of custom firmware.That's what the article is referring to.
Rooting is a different thing. Custom firmware isn't necessarily rooted.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you are big into [choose any topic] and want to do new and interesting things [in such named topic] then then the normal consumer version of [tool used in such topic] is often not well designed in your goal of doing the interesting thing you want to do [in topic]
While we may want a mobile phone that we can modify to to run a company server enabling such features will only cause the general public to install malware and infect the wireless network. They are better off saying these are the Apps you got, so be happy with them. vs. giving them a tool not meant for what they want to do, and opening the door for much more problems with the consumer market.
A Honda Civic isn't a good car if you are interested in racing or offload driving. However it may be a good fit, if you just want to get from point A to point B in basic comfort.
A 40 key midi keyboard isn't a good instrument if you are into classical piano. However if you are learning to play, or just want something to tinker with, or are doing some other work such as music editing. Then it may be a better fit.
A generic brand hammer isn't good if you are carpenter. However if you just need to get a nail in a block of wood, then you should be fine.
People will often spend a lot of money for "Professional" tools, while they lack the skills to use them, and they are much better off with the consumer version. As they may be designed to be more generically used and require less maintenance, as they have a lower tolerance level for accuracy, but you will never know because you are not an expert.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, people may not be interested in building a custom ROM, or even rooting a device, but if their techie friend warns them that the phone from FooTel will ship with adware and spyware that they can't get rid of, and uploads their intimate pictures to some site overseas, they will eschew that phone for something more trustworthy.
I have had people ask a brand provider recommendation more than once, and privacy is a big concern, even for the people who are relatively clueless about tech stuff. They may not be rooting their phones, but they will be looking for advice from people who do.
You wrote (or were implying) that nerds don't have much influence over common users and you used the desktops as an example. In my reply I wanted to counter that statement by saying that nerds have still much influence and they use it where it applies. Anyway, almost all users (even power users) can get around by using Windows instead of Linux in the Desktop. This is the main reason Linux failed on the Desktop, even though it wasn't meant for this to begin with. Now returning to smartphones (which is this topic's subject btw.), almost all power users will run into problems sooner or later which can only be overcome by unlocking their bootloader and applying various workarounds. So this is the reason nerds are recommending Linux only on very special cases (few for Desktops, many for other cases), but would never recommend locked phones over unlocked ones. This is also the reason most OEMs still allow unlocking their bootloader, even though they know very few people actually use it.
I don't believe most of us are deluded enough to believe we can fight past the battle of attrition against the dreaded "new shiny".
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Maybe they are going the Apple route. Hoping a closed off, walled off ecosystem is the best way. Sorry, I've had 3 of their phones. Excellent phones, great battery life. I've never felt the "need" to root any of their phones, but, I had the OPTION. Them taking away the OPTION is not good. Their biggest issue with me is lack of patch updates. I'm not so much concerned about which version of Android is on my device, but I would like to have the monthly security updates. With Huawei, even those can get bogged down unless you live in the Asia area. Now that the USA has pretty much kicked them out, I've moved on to the Essential PH-1 for now, given how dirt cheap it was. Great little phone, got Android 9 the minute I powered it up.
Because it only takes one person digging around in their phone's innards to expose the spyware.
Have gnu, will travel.