TL;DR
- ASUS has apparently withdrawn the ability to unlock the bootloader on its phones.
- As per the company’s technical support team, Zenfone 10 and Zenfone 9 users
ASUS is apparently killing the posibility of me being a potential customer of their smartphones.
Rooting users are only a small percentage of all users so they probably won’t even notice unfortunately.
sent from rooted phone
People who just want a vanilla experience likely all buy Samsung.
Samsung goes so hard with their proprietary apps and intrusive ads. The closest to vanilla I’ve gotten is a pixel phone.
By vanilla I mean the most basic for consumers, not debloated factory default, which is what someone who roots their phone might want. The average customer is definitely not bothering with that,
Samsung unlocked is free to root, and they even provide the tools to do so. Most models supported in the free distros as well.
Yeah, but then you break Knox, and can’t EVER fix it. The phone becomes instantly worthless for resale.
Doesn’t matter if I ever want to root my phone or not.
It’s mine.
ASUS annihilated the possibility I’d ever buy any ASUS product after the way they handled the 7800X3D/AM5 VoC issue. I had never really noticed, but a pretty big swathe of my tech came from them (laptop, monitor, and motherboard among others) but no more.
Oh, fuck off. I’m not one to root my phone, but you own the damn thing. Once it’s in your hands, the maker should have no right to tell you what to do with it.
Yeah, I’m really tired of this.
We should be able to root and install any OS on our phones like we can do on PC.
I don’t use root or custom ROMs on my phone anymore but this is something that should always be possible.
Consumers seem to be too dumb for their own good.
Regulators seem to be too captured for consumers’ good.
Well there goes any compelling reason to buy their phones lol
I was genuinely thinking about going with an ASUS phone next because of the unlockable bootloader, this really sucks to see.
There are plenty of makers doing unlockable bootloaders. Honestly, just avoid Samsung.
My EU S9+ (Exynos chip) is running a custom Android 13 rom without flaws. A lot of Samsung phones can be unlocked. Seems US models (Snapdragon) are the ones that can’t be unlocked, few exceptions. Most other countries have the Exynos chipset and are perfectly unlockable.
i think this might be related to samsung knox and its efuse, once set not really being able to be undone and that stuff
Same here. Well they lost a potential costumer.
Yeah no reasons besides only tiny stuff like being only flagship under 6", better speakers than samsung, better cooling and less throttling than samsung, headphone jack, near stock android. More like there are no compelling reasons to root anymore, enjoy your 1k samsung throttling tho
2 years of updates means you’ll quickly end up with a phone that’s waiting to be hacked
They offer 4 years of security updates, what are you on about? It’s even better than sony
Well it’s better but it’s still not enough imo.
People shouldn’t be left behind on security just because they don’t have the latest phone, 4 years isn’t long at all.
Now phones are powerful enough to last years, and could last even longer with replaceable batteries. This artificial limitation is anti-customer.
So yeah at least there should be an way to root and install custom ROMs, they may not want to support phones longer officially but they shouldn’t limit the user if they want to do it themselves.
DAE 10 years of support for 800€ ?
They don’t have to support it 10 years, but they shouldn’t prevent people to keep their phones updated themselves with custom ROMs.
Ah the peak of security, third party custom roms. Accept your hobby isnt popular and move on, grown ups like their banking apps working
I remember owning their Transformer tablet back when Honeycomb first launched.
Considering their crappy major release and security update support, rooting and flashing custom images is basically a requirement.
And there I was seriously considering getting one. Greed is ruining good things again.
Again? I didn’t realize the ride had stopped for a bit. .
I don’t understand how this move is even supposed to make them more money.
My guess is they’re going to slow down the device on new android and block rooting so you can’t install your own OS, also, probably doing a lot of spying on the users.
Locked bootloader and only 2 years of upgrades? Is not like Zenfones are cheap either. Hard pass!
This is such an anti-consumer move, by refusing to unlock the bootloader Asus hinders the ability of users to extend their devices’ life beyond Asus’s original support window by flashing alternative ROMs…
I’d like to see right to repair laws expanded to right to unlock. I think you could make a reasonable argument that a working device that’s not receiving security updates is just as broken as a device that’s experienced a hardware failure.
As much as I agree, I don’t think our legislators are knowledgable enough to be able to handle the issue, and majority of the users don’t care enough to push for something like this. This isn’t like USB-C vs Lightning where users are sick of buying cables and chargers, so the issue is much more visible.
Simple fix: stop buying Asus phones. Once their profit drops they will let you unlock bootloader
A typical example of planned obsolescence what an effective way of killing my plans to get an Asus phone as my next daily driver assuming this is true
Some important context from the article:
A Reddit user claims that the company’s developer liaison on its Telegram channel has no knowledge of any such development. “According to them, the unlock tool server is in maintenance and will resume in Q3,” the person writes; We’ve written to ASUS to clarify the situation and will update this article when and if we hear more.
But here is the thing why do I need to use a tool to connect to a server just to be allowed to unlock the bootloader? I don’t and didn’t need such a thing to unlock the bootloader of my Samsung Galaxy phone (planned obsolescence ladies and gentlemen)
But here is the thing why do I need to use a tool to connect to a server just to be allowed to unlock the bootloader
It’s been this way since I first flashed a custom ROM on my 2011 Xperia and I’ve never gotten it. It seems so useless. Either Huawei or Xiaomi wanted me to provide a REASON for unlocking.
I think Nexus phones were unlockable without making a request to a server. I might be wrong though. But I do miss the Nexus line.
Pixel devices don’t require permission via a server. Unlocking is enabled via developer settings on the device.
Doing it any other way is user-hostile.
Unless you get Verizon’ed that is
I suspect it’s to keep a record which can be used to defend themselves from lawsuits. “You caught that virus after you removed our protections, so it’s your own fault. Here’s the receipt.”
Am on a galaxy 21 U5g and was looking at my next phone being a zenfone.
Not a chance now.
Boo you whore. Asus really is just kicking itself in the dick the last 5 years or so.
No kidding, especially with their recent motherboards catching on fire, and then voiding users’ warranties for updating to the beta BIOS that fixes the issue, fiasco.
They used to be such a good company; what happened?
Yeah, don’t have one of these, but I was looking at one before settling on a Pixel 7 Pro instead. Have had some sketchy interactions with Asus regarding support and warranty in the past. Might be looking elsewhere in the future where ever Asus is an option. I really don’t like they changing promises retroactively.
Why do so many phone manufacturers hate letting you unlock their bootloaders? Every Google phone lets you do this, and they probably have the most secure Androids of them all.
Google shouldn’t be our shining light on phone rules lol
pixels are by far the best to degoogled your phone and to have privacy/security/freedom actually
they go above and beyond letting you unlock your bootloader
Oneplus? Bootloader is easily unlocked and it can be debloated easily after root
deleted by creator
This 100%
Rooting is a terrible security risk and there’s no point in doing it. You won’t see the popular roms like GrapheneOS, /e/, or CalyxOS supporting it.
Lol this is the technology page and you’re going to try to make the argument to not root(/jailbreak) a phone?.. Genuinely lold
Yes…? You can have custom roms without sacrificing security. There’s genuinely no reason to root anymore.
Can’t tell if troll or not
Probably because they know their OS is a duct-taped piece of garbage which could fall to pieces if you look at it wrong while unlocked.
Do consumer friendly phones exist at this point?
Pixel phones are the few ones that you can unlock the bootloader and lock again.
fairphone is fully repairable and rootable
Sony allows unlocking the bootloader on a lot of their devices. Except two new US-specific models, according to their site.
This is exactly why I sent my Zenphone 9 back. Shame because it was such a good little phone and one of the few flagships with a headphone jack.
Zenfone 9 can’t be bootloader unlocked?
Nope. At least not when I bought mine only a couple of months ago, I guess right when they blocked the unlocking tool from being used. Super annoying.
The end of an era. Companies also locked the bootloader back then and you’ll need to find a vulnerability to exploit in order to unlock it. When custom roms starting to become popular, companies relaxed their stance and allowing their customers to unlock the bootloader using an official channel instead of utilizing a security exploits, perhaps as a competitive advantage so power users would recommend them to their friends and family.
Now with declining popularity of rooting and custom roms, companies are starting to stop allowing their customers to unlock the bootloader again. From their perspective, allowing bootloader unlocking is nothing but trouble (support-wise) and might even cannibalize sales (why upgrade your phone every two years when you can install a custom ROM with the latest version of Android), so declining popularity of custom ROMs is a perfect excuse for them to stop allowing bootloader unlocking.
It should be illegal to restrict what people can do with their own goddamn motherfucking private property.
Once digital media got away with “actually we are just letting you borrow it and can take it away whenever we want”, hardware manufacturers have been drooling to do the same. Apple and game console manufacturers are most of the way there already.
Well it sure is a good thing they are making everything smart nowadays….
But seriously I can’t believe how fast the car industry locked previously free features behind a subscription
I agree with the sentiment, but even the claim that they were free is part of their narrative. Their cost was included in the price of the car, everyone paid for it already. They are double-dipping.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Yeah, that’s the dystopia we’re
headed towardsalready arriving at, except I’m not fucking happy.
I suspect we’ll eventually need to create a standard much like th PC Clone, in which hardware, OS and software are independently produced and support compatibility standards.
Not in the current clime of unregulate capitalism, though.
I’m afraid the PC ecosystem is one-of-a-kind, and perhaps once it’s gone, we’ll never have anything like it again. Companies are obsessed with vertical integration now, owning everything from software to peripherals and accessories. The closest thing we have to PC ecosystem where multiple independent companies works to support a single platform is perhaps the raspberry pi ecosystem, but even then it’s pale in comparison to the PC ecosystem in term of variety and number of manufacturers.
It’s my device. I will do with it whatever the fuck I desire
