We really need to make this into a website for 'hostile smartphones' or a 'list of smartphones to avoid', and popularize it among the normal folks. This is relevant to them even if they don't unlock the phones themselves. They could pay someone to unlock it and upgrade it - but only if the phone can be unlocked.
The manufacturers will do something about it when their hostile behaviour starts to affect their bottom line. They have been ripping us off for far too long.
I think this is living in fantasy land. Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's. There was an uptick many years past simply because this offered new functionality, but anymore there really isn't any reason to outside of small things like removing the Google Search bar from the home screen. But the amount of effort versus the result does not balance out.
Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications. There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
As opposed to corporations extracting an insane amount of wealth from the struggling public? Such shallow dismissals ignore the fact that ordinary people know how exploitative these companies are and that they are interested in resisting - if only they knew how.
> Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's.
I have been guilty of this too. But let me say this. We on HN have been quite contemptuous towards 'normal people', especially regarding their technical competence.
Besides, you pretend as if everyone needs to know all those stuff to take advantage of it. Back in the past when mechanical watches and repairable automobiles were common place, we all took advantage of their serviceability, despite that only a rare few of us knew how to service it. We just paid those independent experts to do it for us. Everybody knew some basic economics to realize how this was in their favor. The argument that serviceability has no use to the majority is a disingenuous and harmful, all by itself.
> Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications.
Just go ahead and ask these 'normal people' whether they prefer a serviceable device or one that suffers deliberate obsolescence in less than 3 years and forces them to buy an entirely new one.
> There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
Look at how many of these 'normal people' actively try to avoid the likes of Amazon. Their insane wealth allows them to manipulate the market in their favor. People learned this well during the post-pandemic hoarding epidemic.
So please stop pretending that essential features and freedoms are too complex to be worth it. People can take advantage of them even if they don't know how to do it themselves - like by paying independent professional servicemen. And at least in the current smartphone market, its complexity is entirely the contribution of the OEMs. Also, one of the reasons why the old PCs running windows 10 doesn't have to be junked immediately (due to win 11 requirements) is because it is so easy to install an up-to-date and modern OS on it.
Security, convenience etc are false arguments against user freedoms, and are most often the result of the deliberate choices by the OEMs. They're are just consumer gas lighting tactics.
Narrator's Narrator: "The overwhelming majority of consumers don't care about the bootloader, so the market forces do not have an incentive to keep it unlocked. This leads to the market not 'fixing itselt'. "
This isn't the 'market not fixing itself'. This is the 'market being actively manipulated and enshittified'. Don't forget that it's much easier to leave the boot-loader unlockable or even unlockable by just the owner, than it is to keep it locked and under control of a remote corporation. They went out of their way to enshittify it.
This isn't true. It's far more secure to lock the boot loader and block root than it is to leave them open. This is a basic security measure from the OEM. They didn't just wake up yesterday and go "let's mess with those nerds."
Somebody said "easier" and you said "more secure." Then, your argument that it was more secure (which nobody was discussing) is that it is "basic." Then you added an irrelevant strawman with a slur in it against the person you were arguing with.
Yes, it is more secure against the user. That is not a desirable characteristic for the user, it is a desirable characteristic for the controller of the operating system.
I disagree. The answer to your counter is in the same comment that you're countering. It's easier to let the owner alone unlock it, rather than lock it to everyone and then control it remotely (at least for updates). At the minimum, they could have used the same mechanism to support owner unlocking.
Also, this isn't a 'nerd' problem. The economics of smart phones would be much saner if phones weren't so deliberately anti-recycling. Thus it affects all consumers. Framing this as a 'nerd vs corporation' fight is misleading at best.
I'm growing less tolerant of the use of security as a convenient excuse for these big companies to restrict their customers on their own devices. There are always alternatives that don't involve infringing on consumer rights. And most of the time, that alternative is rather trivial. But the OEMs just ignore it and never mention it while excusing themselves. That's intentional gaslighting.
> It's far more secure to lock the boot loader and block root than it is to leave them open.
And you completely neglected an important part of my question. They didn't just lock the boot loader and the root. They also put measures in place to retain remote control of the same. Why not share that control with, or simply transfer it to the owner? Please don't argue with me that this is harder than what they've done for themselves.
We all know the answer for that - profits - something they can't ever be satisfied with. As an engineer, I know that such extra privileges can be made foolproof. It can be designed to prevent normal users from accidentally messing it up, while power users and service professionals can easily navigate their way to a full customization. I know this because I still retain that control on my laptop. There is absolutely no reason why it has to be different on a phone.
But OEMs won't consider it, talk about it or even entertain public discourse about it. Instead, they spend plenty of money on projecting the consumers they exploit as too naive and incompetent to take care of a device they paid dearly for. This is an absolutely vile and reprehensible corporate behavior that gets excused only because they captured their regulators.
> They didn't just wake up yesterday and go "let's mess with those nerds."
Of course not! Instead, they just woke up yesterday and decided "let's screw our entire consumer base". What you've demonstrated here is another example of their dirty tactics. Frame this as a fight between them and the 'nerds' and pitch the consumers against each other. Let's just end the charade that this sort of overreach hurts only the nerds. It truly harms all consumers. People who are old enough to remember service shops and repairmen know what I'm talking about. But these crony capitalists have been at it for so long now that there is an entire generation who doesn't know what's possible with user serviceability. That's the sort of leaching that they've inflicted upon the society.
And, security is never an honest or acceptable excuse for restricting user freedoms. Anybody who argues that information security and user freedoms are mutually exclusive is out to sell techno snake oil. Yet another reprehensible behavior that needs to be reined in.
I can buy a smartphone or tablet that's 100% unlockable and has all the bells and whistles right now, and get it delivered in 24 hours, and not pay significantly more than average.
I think the market is working just fine. (To which people usually say "for now". Well yeah, the sun hasn't gone supernova... for now)
Yes, and heroin users can go buy fruits and veggies if they want to improve their health outlook. The fact that better alternatives exist does not mean the market will reward them, which is the point the parent is making.
if the market is not solving the problem then the natural conclusion is that it is not a problem that needs solving, pretty sad about it that not that many people care about these things.
The opposite is pretty much true when it comes to security I am generally forced to use an apple device since I can be relatively sure that my keys will be safe (not including state sponsored actors, at that point I would have bigger problems).
Now something for the market to actually solve would be poor hardware security in general making locked bootloaders serve no purpose, having strong built-in security at the SOC would diminish the advantages gained with locked down systems and would allow us to have BYOK without compromising on the general populations security.
Hey, If they want to improve, they can always get a second chance. At least from me.
But I'm also quite happy with my Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and I have no reason to change. And unless Google changes their bootloader-stance in the future I might continue buying Pixels anyways. But its always good to have more options.
Wanting to install a different OS puts you in the tiniest of tiniest slices of consumers shopping for a new phone. There is a tiny amount of market demand for it.
1. We had serviceable devices and vehicles for ages. There was an equally tiny group of people who knew how to service them. However, everyone used to benefit because they paid those tiny group to do it for them. They benefited because those servicemen had incentives that were more aligned with the consumers, than with the manufacturers.
2. This is not like asking the OEMs to develop a feature that serves a tiny group. The size of that group is no excuse to go out of their way to restrict them. This is an explicitly hostile and actively malicious move. That's why I said your mother's unwillingness to use the feature is no excuse to deny the same to others. But you ignored that argument altogether.
3. The 'tiny slice' is not nearly as tiny or insignificant as you'd like others to believe. Plenty of people, especially the teenagers and the youth like to tinker around with devices. The success and popularity of earlier Arduino and Raspberry Pi are undeniable testimony to that. It's also from this group of tinkerers who started from their garage that we got the next generation of innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. These sort of restrictions deny the next generation their own such pioneers and the free-market competition.
OEMs rely on misleading and dishonest arguments like this to gaslight the consumers into unfair deals and squeeze out every bit of unfair profit. In a fair world, such attempts would be strongly condemned and penalized with a loss of marketshare. And it's about time that became a reality.
However, my question wasn't that at all. My question was, what's your motivation in repeating their argument here? How does such an anti-consumer argument help you in any way? Is it consumer Stockholm syndrome?
Being able to install a new OS is not an 'additional feature'. It's the downgrade of a capability that's inherent to the device. It's the same as making a carseat heating a subscriptions service. Whether the users use it or not is entirely irrelevant.
How is that inherent? That's something they added to the device to restrict our options. Now even if we accept the argument that this is necessary for security, why is there no provision for the owner to add their own keys, or bypass it explicitly?
It's inherit because that is how the device was designed to function. Ultimately it's just silicon, so there isn't a default design for how it should work.
Developing a restrictive feature at significant cost and imposing it upon the consumers isn't nearly what a reasonable person would consider as inherent or default. You can argue otherwise based on technicalities or arbitrary definitions and that's what these companies have been frustrating the consumers with. However, such gas lighting is the what justifies the hall of shame, skip lists and name and shame pages and websites like these. I'm hoping that they catch on in popularity because this sort of tactics deserve equally harsh disrepute.
It is a tablestakes security feature. And adding an additional feature to support swapping keys has an additional cost and adds complexity to the design.
Now you're just shifting the goal posts. Locking down the full root and the firmware from even the owner, while retaining an exclusive remote exception for yourself (the OEM) at the same time is worthwhile, but adding or swapping user keys is too complex and costly? Forget the fact that this isn't nearly as complex as what they've set up for themselves. This is the bare minimum that an OEM is obliged to provide the owner, when they lock down the device. They're able to get away without doing that because the market isn't free or fair anymore. They twisted the market and the regulator to unfairly benefit them.
Now we are going from gas lighting to just making up excuses to justify what benefits you (the OEMs). This is exactly what I've been accusing them of, all the while. Their justifications are technically false, misleading, arbitrary, unfair, shallow and opportunistic.
the "ownership" framing is because bootloader locks allow vendors to unilaterally make decisions about how your device operates after you purchase the device.
