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Slight tangent, but I find it mind boggling that so few phones offer bootloader unlocking - which is essential if you truly want to own your phone.

I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.

That's... a shockingly small list!? .

In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!

Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.

Sony used to be surprisingly good on this - but I'm uncertain what the current status actually is:

https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-d...

> Note: New devices XQ-CT62 (1Ⅳ US variant) and XQ-CQ62 (5Ⅳ US variant) do not support bootloader unlock.

https://xdaforums.com/t/unlock-bootloader-and-root-guide-xpe...

To take this a step further. I want a phone that is small (doesn't have to be tiny, just iPhone SE 2020 or smaller, please), has a replaceable battery, has an unlocked bootloader, has a headphone jack, and costs $400 or less.

It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.

I guarantee you that, given your requirements, this will never be a product that you can buy.

Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.

Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.

The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.

Whenever someone tries to build a phone that even tries to tick those boxes y'all just find new excuses to not actually pay for it.

You should check the phones from Unihertz, “the worlds smallest smartphone”

there are websites made for you with millions of parameters to find the phone you need. not amazon or ebay

Filtering for GP's requirements on GSMArena.com, I only see a handful of recent phones. Some of them do have an unlockable bootloader, but all of those are made by GPL violators, so you won't get the source code necessary to really make use of that unlocked status.

EDIT: I forgot to check the "removable battery" checkbox; with it you get zero matching phones. Maybe you should've checked that before assuming GP just can't search.

Not to end on such a negative note, foregoing a maimum height and the removable battery, Sony's Xperia 5 and 10 fit the rest of the requirements and are very good phones. Hard to find for sale in the last few years, though.

hehe so just kinda made Perfect non existent product. free niche :)

The motorola razr flip phones are great in my opinion.

Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.

But I main the $900 pixel.

They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.

Is there an up-to-date list of their phones which allow bootloader unlocking? Not all of them do..

Most 2012 era used phones will work here. Pick one off eBay.

Wouldn't work very well as a phone though. The networks a 2012 phone support no longer exist. 2G and 3G are both fully shut down where I live. Even if you specifically got a 4G phone from 2012 it might not support VoLTE, so you'd be unable to make calls.

As a wifi internet device it would work but I'm not sure that's what OP is going for.

Batteries will be in bad shape.

Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?

'replaceable battery'

"chart of phones with replaceable batteries": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47099020

it is very difficult to find good (as in "good condition") battery for a 5+ old gadget. even if you find original one - it could be expired and DoA. but more often you get "compatibles" which die in 3-6 months.

Fairphone does it properly -- unlockable bootloader, repairability-first design, 10-year software support commitment, and they actually ship security updates on time. the catch is it's Europe-only and the hardware specs are mid-range. if you're in Europe and don't need flagship performance, it's genuinely the right answer to 'can I own my phone'. also LineageOS official device support (lineageos.org/devices) is broader than most people realize -- lots of Motorola and some Xiaomi devices are on there, and the unlock process for those is usually just a fastboot command.

This is a regional thing - a lot of manufacturers offer bootloader unlocking in EU when they don't in US for example. US especially is a nasty carrier monopoly where carriers are allowed (and actively defended) when they do henous lockin.

FxTec Pro1 comes with an unlocked bootloader, and a slide-out keyboard for the true 2010 experience!

Does the OnePlus process work for people? They've got a form that allows you to beg them to let you unlock your phone, but it's never worked for me. Motorola works similarly but it does work, which is why I stick with them.

Meanwhile Pixel doesn't require me to fill out any forms or contact anyone which is why I only use those at this point. IIRC in at least some cases the initial flip of the toggle requires internet access but that doesn't really bother me.

If the process requires anything beyond "internet access" I'm not purchasing the device.

Is this country-specific? I've owned plenty of OnePlus devices over the years and the have all being unlockable without any issues, or without having to ask anything from anyone.

At some point OnePlus announced that they will stop sharing firmware blobs. Lineage os team announced that they will be dropping the support. Then after another few years they were back. I remember because I bought 3 and I was planning to stay with that brand because of easy unlock (via ADB), decent price and good Lineage support. Probably OnePlus reconsidered this at some point. Right now fairly new ones have support. Maybe OP was unlucky and bought one of those models from this period of time.

This has nothing to do with the unlocking though. Unlocking a OnePlus phone is just standard procedure and requires no involvement by the manufacturer.

> (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus

Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.

The Librem 5 would be eliminated by the additional requirements of:

> "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive"

> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"

Adding my own experience: the battery life is also atrocious[0] and simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.

[0] Sitting on a shelf, with the screen off, not connected to cellular networks, not being used at all except to check the battery % periodically throughout the day: I got ~11 hours of battery life. My pixel 10 has been operating under the same conditions for 4 days and is still at 71% battery life (I'm intentionally draining it down to ~50% for long term storage while I wait for the bootloader to unlock in 2 years).

[1] The phone had been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for years. No software had been installed, no accounts had been set up, it had never actually been used as a phone. Could not get more "stock" than that.

> "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance"

First, it is a flagship GNU/Linux phone. Second, https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

> I got ~11 hours of battery life

Looks like you didn't enable the suspend. Later updates brought it to >20 hours.

> simply running a software update on a completely stock librem 5[1] managed to send it into an infinite boot loop that I was only able to recover from by flashing the factory image.

When was it? I never experienced this. It could be a problem in the first years though. Current PureOS Crimson is stable.

> Looks like you didn't enable the suspend

This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson (which I did to recover from the infinite boot loop), so if there is some active step that needs to be taken to enable suspend, then I had not done it.

> When was it?

This was within the past month. I see two possible reasons you didn't run into it:

1) You have been applying the updates as they come out, whereas I took a dusty phone that hadn't been turned on in years and ran the update.

2) You were already on crimson, so maybe they only broke byzantium (or whatever version it was on from years of sitting unused and then hitting update in the software center).

> This was with the default settings after flashing Crimson

This is strange. See this post concerning the battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/. Have you updated the modem firmware?

You are right, I have case 1). It is quite likely that Byzantium is (was) much less stable, as it required a lot of hacks and relied on a very old Debian version.

And Fairphone!

I just want Google to remove that SafetyNet crap.

Banks don't need to know if I unlocked my bootloader.

I can't even use the Waymo app either.

I'd argue that banks DO need to know that you've unlocked your bootloader, but they should present you with a "Your phone bootloader is unlocked. If you don't know what it means or you didn't do it yourself, exit the app now and contact customer support."

The problem is that app makers are lazy.

So if I call in on the phone do they need a video feed of my surroundings to verify that I'm not being extorted? Perhaps if I come into a branch in person to make a large withdrawal they need a drug test to ensure that I'm not intoxicated?

They absolutely do not have any need to know anything about my bootloader or OS version or safety net or otherwise. It's certainly true that it is within the realm of physical possibility for them to put that information to good use in a responsible manner if they had access to it. But being able to make use of something is not the same as a legitimate need.

I can see a future where a video from a hardware/software stack verified by Apple/Google is a required mechanism for authentication.

For example, you have to say or otherwise signal that you authorize the transaction to x person for y amount on z date.

I kind of do it with my tenants when I record a video walk through at the beginning and end of the lease to serve as proof of damages. I could use a checklist on paper and a signature, but I feel like a video is better evidence for me.

Motorola? Is there an up-to-date list of devices where they're "so kind" as to allow bootloader unlocking? Because it's a lottery to me..

It's always a hit or miss with Motorola, but this should up your chances:

https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame...

Although I don't agree with the FSF's way of advocating it [1], I do believe that unlocking the bootloader should be a customer's basic right. You don't truly own your device if you cannot control the software you run with it.

[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

One of the very few genuinely bad takes Linus had.

Bootloader unlocking should be a basic consumer right, and if Linux went GPLv3, it would be closer to reality.

I think expecting software licenses to enforce your rights outside of the realm of software is a pretty bad take. I think Linus's take is quite solid: "I give you my source code, you give me your changes back, and we're even". There are a lot of us who don't think that FOSS should be weaponized as a poison pill to enact the authors worldview on topics outside of the realm of software alone.

If it should be a consumer right, why limit it only to devices certain types of software? Why not consumer protection law that applies to all devices? I think software licenses are the wrong tool for this problem.

There's a lot of crazy crayon licenses out there that try to fix the whole world by tacking on a whole lot of restrictions to their software licenses, prohibiting use for a long list of reasons... to me it sounds like a bunch of newspeak, as if "more restrictions = more freedom"

Is being able to replace software on the devices I own not in "the realm of software" somehow?

"Sure, you can have the sources, you just can't use them on your own devices because the vendor that shipped it has decided to bar you from doing that with a 2048-bit RSA key" just feels like GPL was upheld in letter, but not in spirit.

Yeah, it is -- you're asking for restrictions on pieces of hardware unrelated to the original software other than the fact that someone decided to install it on there.

How would you feel if a piece of hardware came with a license prohibiting software developers from using encryption to secure their systems?

The root of the issue here is that phone hardware landscape is effectively a duopoly. It is an antitrust issue. Trying to use software licenses to do this 1) won't be effective because the duopoly will never use them, and 2) is like going around your ass to get to your elbow. Even if it did work it wouldn't get to the root of the issue. The law needs to fix the fact that almost all phones on the planet are controlled either directly or indirectly by two companies.

It’s not Linus Torvalds’ duty to make bootloader unlocking a reality.

It isn't. But he could have contributed massively to it, and hasn't, and I can and will hold it against him.

There will always be more ways for companies to extract value without contributing. Linus would have to continuously upgrade licenses from GPLV2 to V3 to Affero and so on. It is not really practical.

What Linus has contributed is already huge. We can't put all the burden of making the world right on him.

> Meanwhile, Samsung's own recycling numbers tell a different story. Its old phone collection campaign, running since 2015, had collected just 38,000 phones as of May 2019. Samsung had sold 2 billion Galaxy devices by February 2019.

Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?

> Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?

It sets the price floor and provides liquidity, so the phone doesn’t go into a trash bin instead.

Why not keep using them as...phones?

Snark aside, why are the entirely functional devices obsolete? It's because the growing demands of the endless software bloat, web bloat, feature bloat. New wireless technologies and better protocols, sure, but I've been using software for 35 years and the software contribution to this mess really gets me down.

Part of the reason why Android phones specifically are not supported for very long is because the baseband and modem firmwares from Qualcomm only receive official support and updates for about 2 years.

For everyone? I mean it doesn’t seem to apply to Apple, need it apply to Google or Samsung?

Apple only uses Qualcomm chips as modems. Almost everyone else uses Qualcomm chips as main SoCs.

Now, could hardware vendors tell Qualcomm to go pound sand and run their own support for old SoCs? Yes they could. Do they want to? Hell no, supporting old devices doesn't make any money.

My assumption is that Apple has a better contract with Qualcomm, being their biggest customer (for now, until they completely move over to their custom modems). Apple probably also has been abstracting the firmware from the start inside iOS, while Android didn't until project treble.

Samsung & Pixel are now offering 7 years of updates for flagships, so it would seem it's no longer a hardware/support limitation and purely a financial decision by other android manufacturers, and by Samsung for their non S-series of phones.

TL;DR OEMs are deliberately choosing to not support their devices, not due to any limitations anymore (thanks to project treble).

The screen broke on my S24 but I'd still like to use the compute, ram and storage.

samsung phones can be plugged into an external display and used like a computer right?

Because a person doesn't need to carry 3 phones, but they could be 2 security cameras and 1 phone instead?

> In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project

How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.

Seems like a lack of creativity, plus painting themselves into a corner by promising unlocked bootloaders.

Samsung owns SmartThings, a smart home platform. They could've come up with a suite of apps for turning your phone into a SmartThings-connected camera, or motion detector, or remote control, or button panel, or a dashboard, etc. Either charge a little for the apps, or trust that sucking people into the SmartThings ecosystem will cause them to buy hubs and other devices.

Users might be more willing to upgrade their phone if they can turn the old one into a baby monitor vs getting scammed on a trade-in or letting it sit in a drawer.

Even good PR is an investment in the brand which can be profitable.

The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..

>How about good PR.

They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.

And more bad PR. I am not sure it was worth it.

Fine, I'm just a dumbass. Samsung BAD.

If you want to live in a binary world. Meanwhile for the rest of us "not good" isn't the same as "bad."

I'm really sorry okay? Samsung not good. Please stop.

> Welcome to capitalism?

Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.

> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.

Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!

We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.

You wrote that like there is no other way. Yes there is. For example I would not consider a job that would consist of writing a malware But I have conscience and doing something like that would make me uncomfortable. Even when I think about myself as more capitalist than socialist.

Well the theory is the market will offer alternatives that allow consumers to choose the best products.

But in reality capitalists get to choose the products and use advertising to brainwash us into wanting whatever shit they're shoveling.

Capitalism is supposed to optimise production for efficiency. In reality the people holding the principal capital use it to optimise for profit and we're largely impotent to do anything because they'll just lean more on the 'brainwash' aspect of profitability... Maybe go so far as to sway elections, to put in fascists so they can exercise larger handles of control... all to get a favorable tax regime when they've already got more money than they can spend.

Ho-hum.

I think there's a way out, through cooperatives, possibly, but it's a multi-generational path before you can really start to make change.

Why are korean tech companies so toxic? Samsung, LG, SK etc all the same. Doesn’t matter if they sell you a phone, a TV, or a refrigator there is something inherently wrong how korean companies are treating the customers.

When Samsung accounts for almost 25% of South Korea's GDP they are allowed to do whatever they want, and they will set the tone and consumer approach.

Good reminder that companies so large are never a good thing.

Same thing with Verizon wireless, who dominated the US cell phone market. Openly hostile "customer service".

This question hinges on the fact that they are the dominant brands in the US and some other markets, which is not true when you look at China or India. They benefit from lack of competition.

Now, if you ask me why there is a lack of competition of phone brands in the US, I have a TED talk to give...

Most handset manufacturers are like this, don't think it's specific to samsung

Are Korean tech companies more toxic than, say, American tech companies?

Doubtful. I can't think of a company that clearly hates its users more than Microsoft or Meta.

I'd say it's the tech industry as a whole that's toxic. And long overdue for a reckoning.

I can't really think of a tech company that does not hate its users. Yes of course there's Framework, but I mean large tech companies. It's all glued shut, proprietary, planned obsolescence, AI slop-ified, privacy invasive and over priced. Feel free to add to the list.

Related anecdote: My old washing machine is about to die, and I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day. He told me, with much excitement, about his new washing machine with AI, and a smartphone app where he can program his own washing cycles. I... just don't feel like I belong on the same planet as this person. It's the polar opposite of what I want.

Flip Phones are gaining in popularity. Though I imagine the mfrs get as much of the same offenses them as the simpler devices will afford them.

You can go a long way with just Termux. You can upcycle old phones by installing or building code in Termux to turn the phones into a compute grid, AI inference nodes, file servers, compute servers, web servers.

https://www.analyticsinsight.net/gadgets/old-android-phone-r...

I was actually just going to do that with an old Galaxy S24. Seems like there's no easy way to add something like docker. Best I can find is to try to use qemu to get a full Linux VM.

Do you happen to know what kind of performance you can expect? Or perhaps a better way?

There's an app called Termux that comes with distro sources compiled for the Android/Linux. They're not binary compatible with regular GNU/Linux, but runs most software through distro standard ways.

> AI inference nodes

Are phones any good for that? (I agree with the rest, and I'm a big fan of termux, I just wouldn't have thought of a phone - especially an old phone - as a useful way to run AI)

Modern phones pack a good bit of compute, and can run things like VLAs decently well.

Of course, that would require today's phones to age out of "being used as a phone" bracket, and robotics VLAs to become actually useful. But things like the Comma AI autopilot hardware use slightly obsolete smartphone chips internally - so it's not like it's impossible to run a useful AI on this kind of HW.

I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.

I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!

This was not going to come from Samsung, one of the most over-zealous companies out there when it comes from preventing rolling out purely software features from today's phones to yesterday's. E.g. "Now Bar" a literal online feature is blocked on older phones. (Don't get me wrong, it's a useless feature, just shows their thinking)

Or when they announced that "Linux on Dex", for which they had been doing public beta testing on Note 9 phones, would only support the just-released Note 10. (And then they dropped the entire thing anyway).

These are phones for which the only difference between generations may be a couple mAh in the battery. Yet they still use software to gate features.

Am I a fool to think that upcycled devices might not dent the sales of new devices, but would be used in new ways that would actually be positive for the vendor?

I think any effect on Samsung, positive or negative, would be negligible. It would help their PR slightly, but mostly among a relatively small part of their customer base.

On the negative side, it would probably have a minor impact on the number of new phones sold if old ones were able to be "refurbished" in this way. Again, probably not significant, but if it's even a penny cash flow negative, why invest their resources in it?

Overall the only significant gain to be made is the announcement because it can be spun and quoted to the average consumer as Samsung being more eco-friendly. It's akin to enabling consumerism, and consumers generally don't go to check if companies were telling the truth about this stuff.

My guess, is it boils down to legal liability. Every time I look into repurposing my old smartphones, I inevitably go down the "well, it probably won't burn my house down… but. " It's the same reason why I don't use Molex-to-SATA power adapters, even though I could save a few bucks. Regardless, Samsung ghosting iFixit is inexcusable.

If you remove the battery and power it externally (which you should if you're expecting to run it 24/7) what's the house-burning risk?

> 76 points by 1970-01-01 2 hours ago

Did we accidentally time travel again?

This is why legislation matters, capitalism cannot sort out such misbehaviors when the public keeps giving money to the same bad actors.

I'm in the market for a new phone. is there a list of phones somewhere that are hackable?

And then they completely removed bootloader unlocking with OneUI 8, in many cases increasing the anti-rollback version so you can't even downgrade.. I can't wait for them to go out of business..

I really dislike how people consider Android a Linux operating system. It's incredibly misleading and serves as more marketing than substance. If it were, then the Samsung Upcycle program would be ready to go.

Because it is. Android runs a modified Linux kernel. There's nothing misleading about it at all, unless you think "Linux" means something that it does not.

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