Samsung Adds More Devices to Its Self-Repair Program, Including Foldables for the First Time
Samsung Adds More Devices to Its Self-Repair Program, Including Foldables for the First Time
That ship has sailed a long time ago. Even Xiaomi is moving away from that.
Last I checked it takes about 360 hours to get permission to unlock the bootloader on a Xiaomi device. Also you have to have your sim card in the phone while requesting the unlock.
I think it makes sense. Xiaomi had a lot of issues with shady companies importing cheap phones for the Asian market, flashing the xiaomi.eu ROM onto them, and passing the off as official.
The fact they still allow you to unlock the bootloader in the first place shows they value the freedom to unlock these phones. When they came up with a plan to combat these reflashed phones, they could've simply locked down the bootloader entirely. Setting up a whole web service with SIM validation and such isn't cheap, they spent money on keeping their phones open!
Well, it's going to be worse now, with HyperOS devices not getting updates if they unlock their bootloader. I think they're going to implement some more limits too, like time or device limits. It's throughly depressing overall.