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I have to wonder what Samsung's motivation is here. Of course they probably have some bloatware they profit from, but someone who plans to unlock the bootloader just won't buy their device now. Samsung only benefits if they lose money on device sales (do they?) and make it up on "services".
How many people are there that unlock their bootloader?
The writing's been on the wall for custom ROMs in general for a while, so I've been starting to think about a mobile phone vendor I could actually have a decent business relationship with. I.e. use their stock ROM and be fairly happy with it. Any opinions? Samsung was a candidate for their somewhat unified ecosystem. Maybe even apple.
Whatever floats your boat. I'll remain with the latest vendor making custom OS possible. FYI Pixels still allow flashing custom ROMs, they've just slightly inconvenienced developers.
The future I'm seeing is one in which custom ROMs still exist as hobby projects, but aren't suitable for use in "production".
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Adding cpu instructions is something that you can't physically do, however unlocking the bootloader is something you can do via software, and if a vendor chooses to lock it down they're basically taking away your ability to do anything you would want to do with a device. Sadly this is has been the case for a while and it's probably going to continue being the case.
You can physically do it with a microcode update. Nothing is being taken away since this change is for new products. They just are not providing an additional feature to these products.
> You can physically do it with a microcode update.
Do these ARM CPUs even have microcode? Unlike on x86 CPUs where there are some very complex instructions which have to be microcoded, on ARM all instructions are simple enough that their decoding into micro-operations can be completely hard-coded in the decoder logic.
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How many people are there that unlock their bootloader?
Few, and far fewer than in the early days of Android. It's odd that a company Samsung's size would care about this.
dont worry, samsung knows only 300 people will actually care. As for me, I already swore off Samdung for their whole Samsung account bs and apps they bundle and won't let me remove (or disable).
samsung is the only smartphone manufacturer that still makes phones (though not many) with all the features I want: microSD slot, dual physical sim, side-mounted fingerprint reader, headphone jack, nfc, and regular (long-lasting) security updates they also have service centers pretty much everywhere in the world, so I can always get my phone fixed (for a reasonable price, as a result of their ubiquity) if and when I…
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Fairphone does! https://www.fairphone.com/en/bootloader-unlocking-code-for-f...
Do anyone know why GrapheneOS doesn't support fairphone?
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If malware could install microcode it could break the security of the system. There is more consumer benefit than harm by locking it down to trusted updates.
The security model could allow the end user to install keys for the root of trust for the CPU, much like how UEFI Secure Boot allows you to install your own keys. That CPUs don't have this functionality may not be purposefully anti-consumer (and just laziness), but the net effect is anti-consumer. As it stands, besides preventing the user from making modifications to CPU functionality, the user is also forced to "tru…
That would be less of an issue if the updates were auditable (that is, security researchers could read and study them), even if users weren't able to modify them. Unfortunately, other than some early CPU designs, AFAIK microcode updates are always encrypted. I suspect that their reason is to protect "trade secrets" on details of their CPU design.
I have to wonder what Samsung's motivation is here. Of course they probably have some bloatware they profit from, but someone who plans to unlock the bootloader just won't buy their device now. Samsung only benefits if they lose money on device sales (do they?) and make it up on "services".
[1] https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Galaxy-S22/One-UI-7-0-Up...
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Fairphone does! https://www.fairphone.com/en/bootloader-unlocking-code-for-f...
Do anyone know why GrapheneOS doesn't support fairphone?
From a security/privacy perspective the fairphone is on the worse side of options unfortunately.
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I decided to part with my Huawei Mate 20 X after about 7 years of ownership not because it was a bad phone - on the contrary, it has a nice big screen, decent enough camera, is still plenty fast enough etc - but because the OS hadn't received any updates in a long time. Rather than see it go to landfill I donated it to a friend who's happy to use it but what an absolute waste. Bought a Pixel purely because they are c…
I've been using Xiaomi phones but I had to buy a new phone every year or two just because they get so sluggish. My other Android phones kind of had the same, except my Nothing 2 has been going strong. Has this been your experience as well, or have your phones been OK with responsiveness? Seven years is a long time, I imagine the phone must have been unusable by then.