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Android

Drastically Reduced Xiaomi Bootloader Unlock Policy Raises Questions Over Device Ownership (androidpolice.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD from the freedom-limiting dept.
Xiaomi has further restricted bootloader unlocking to just one device per user per year, significantly hindering custom ROM development and reinforcing user dependence on its proprietary HyperOS ecosystem. Android Police reports: Roughly a year ago, Xiaomi introduced a policy limiting users to three unlocked devices per account, providing only a limited time window for unlocking, and demanding waiting periods before doing so. It's now gone even further, limiting users to unlocking the bootloader of just a single device throughout the year. Unlocking the bootloader changes the way a phone works by preventing automated software updates, among other things, and isn't a good idea for most users. Power users love it for complete customization of their devices, and unlocked bootloaders are critical to the creation and installation of privately developed operating systems, or custom ROMs.

Custom ROMs usually (but not always) derive from pre-existing OSs like Android or Xiaomi's HyperOS. To write operating software that works on a certain device, you need to develop it on that specific device. Consequently, individuals and teams throughout the enthusiast phone sphere constantly add to their collections of bootloader-unlocked phones. The new unlocking restrictions could place undue hardship on resource-limited development teams, reducing the number of custom ROMs produced moving forward. Xiaomi first tightened restrictions roughly a year ago, following the enforcement of a Chinese law requiring certain pre-installed software behaviors. But Xiaomi's business plan and sales models indicate a couple of other motivations for insisting users stick with its first-party HyperOS. Some of the motives include preventing scalping, avoiding accidental bricking, and preserving advertising-driven revenue. However, these measures come at the cost of user freedom and may stifle innovation within the enthusiast developer community.

Drastically Reduced Xiaomi Bootloader Unlock Policy Raises Questions Over Device Ownership More | Reply

Drastically Reduced Xiaomi Bootloader Unlock Policy Raises Questions Over Device Ownership

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  • I haven't seen this... (Score:3)

    by Barny ( 103770 ) on Friday January 03, 2025 @05:11AM (#65059153) Journal

    Admittedly I've only owned two, but both (international versions) were unlocked out of the box.

    Also, there is a great java tool that lets you pull all the bloatware out of the HyperOS system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by twosat ( 1414337 )

      Xiaomi phones are available in New Zealand, but PB Tech is the only company that I know of in my city that sells them in a shop. Having had good experiences with Oppo and Motorola phones, I bought a 4G Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 recently when it was on sale for 40% off. The main reason I got it was because it has the now-rare features of call recording and auto on/off. Also it isn't as bulky as the low-end Xiaomi models. The lowest review rating was given by somebody who was frustrated at attempting to install a

    • The phones are sim unlocked, but I remember having to wait a month after registering my phone on their app to unlock the bootloader. It was a pia and I couldn't use the phone since I didn't trust a Chinese rom. They do this in the hopes that you will keep using their ROM after 30days and so they can collect all your info.

  • There are vendors with sensible policies.

    • Yeah. I have occasionally considered going Xiaomi for my primary phone but never actually taken the plunge. Now I can safely say I won't until further notice. Not that I enjoyed my Samsung experience at all. I spent the last 3 years taking great photos and swearing at the thing for not staying asleep when I tell it to stay asleep, but instead opening dozens of random applications and making random UI configuration changes. Worst UI fuckup in the entire universe. Next phone is definitely not Samsung.

      Yeah, I

  • Xiaomi == CCP (Score:1, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 )
    You buy a phone from a company run by a communist dictatorship.

    And your problem with it is that it restricts the number of times you can unlock the bootloader.

    Think bigger.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      You mean bigger like intentionally backdooring encryption standards and forcing vendors to use compromised algorithms?

    • As macroeconomic and foreign policy it's not clear that it was a great idea; but from a product perspective it's pretty accurate: if you own the bootloader the vendor is just a board-stuffer. If they own the bootloader you are just a user.

      Plus, from a macroeconomic and foreign policy perspective the choice is so often whether to buy a phone from a company that marks up the phone they bought from a company run by a communist dictatorship(really an authoritarian state capitalist dictatorship; but the cospl
    • Fact check shows Xiaomi is a private company, no government founders, no government investors:

      On 6 April 2010 Xiaomi was co-founded by Lei Jun and six others: Lin Bin (), vice president of the Google China Institute of Engineering Zhou Guangping (), senior director of the Motorola Beijing R&D center Liu De (), department chair of the Department of Industrial Design at the University of Science and Technology Beijing Li Wanqiang (), general manager of Kingsoft Dictionary Huang Jiangji (), principal deve

      • correction now a public company, HK listed: In June 2018, Xiaomi became a public company via an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising $4.72 billion

    • That said, I've been buying Motorolas from said commie dicks for ages, with great satisfaction. Am I doing it wrong?

  • Well, Xiaomi has been bad for many years now (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Friday January 03, 2025 @06:19AM (#65059217)

    Well, xiaomi being more and more invasive and less and less advanced customer-friendly has been a trend for at least 6 or 7 years now.

    The company was pretty cool in 2015-2018 or thereabouts. I had two phones from them from the redmi note line which were very good, then the enshittification began in earnest and by 2020 there was no reason to even bother with them.

    As someone said in a thread a few days ago, a refurbished top-of-the-line Samsung from 2 years ago at 1/4 of the original price is much, much better value than the latest-greatest.

    • They wanna be more Apple than Apple. They even have cars now, just to show them how it's done! I guess a jillion-dollar AR headset is next.

    • On a refurb phone do you have a way to get the battery replaced so the phone is really, actually, good as new in terms of battery life and waterproof? I've had such spotty luck I've gone to buying lower-end phones new instead.

      • Only anecdotal evidence as I have one refurb and it is ancient - an HTC EVO 3D. Maybe I got lucky, but it is fine. Got it off ebay from people unknown years ago. I'm using it to make 3D photos when I travel, not as a phone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unfortunately many companies seem to tend towards Apple as they get more popular.

  • Besides Tariffs, Trump can add other non tariff protectionism. something like: WARNING: MANUFACTURER LOCKED. This electronic device comes with a crippled bootloader mechanism preventing owner initiated changes. You have no means to correct this, and it may restrict/damage future resale value. Then a higher tariff rate on these crippled /locked handsets. And a flat $20 tax if unlocked bootloaders are not released when the product reaches EOL/Unsupported. If they choose not to, then FCC or whoever can add d

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      *cough* iPhone.

    • Lol yeah theoretically he could. Given he doesn't personally care and no-one is his supporters care and almost no one who voted for him cares it ain't going to happen.

      Also the FCC likely can't do jack after his supreme court utterly crippled regularity bodies. That was as designed in case you didn't realise. This is going to be a presidency for the companies, specifically the ones that keep giving him money.

      • 'a presidency for the companies'

        Given a choice between 'a presidency for the companies' and 'a presidency for the government', I'll choose the former.

        Because 'a presidency for the government' is, in fact, 'a presidency for the companies'. And after the majority of the past 15 years, and much of the previous 51 years, being dominated by alternately corporate interests and government intrusion in every part of our lives here in the US, anything else might be preferable.

        But at least the companies show themselv

        • That makes no sense at all, so you world prefer a president for companies over a president for companies because...?

          But also you just made up a false dichotomy post hoc to justify your decision. Didn't make a kick off sense. The choice was between corporate interests and really strong, really corrupt corporate interests with a side order of leopards eating your face. Maybe you won't get your face eaten this time.

          • Sadly, my point has to be that that's not a nickel's difference between the outcomes. The third option, President for the people, is the only real option.

            • Sadly, my point has to be that that's not a nickel's difference between the outcomes.

              This is pretty objectively wrong. Just because one option is bad does not mean another option cannot be worse.

              • You think our two political parties are truly adversaries? The only adversary in this bring mix is Trump. He's not really Republican, and certainly not Democrat. You can't know this, however, you're not aware of the real problem. Our government no longer answers to the profile, hasn't for a long time. May never again.

                The real trouble here is you're watching a very different movie than I am. The script of the movie in seeing is written in court documents and the statements of the cast, not the critics and pr

                • You think our two political parties are truly adversaries?

                  Ah, "true" adversaries. Well, the great thing about that is it's almost completely meaningless and you can point to almost anything and say "well that's not a true adversarial action".

                  Political parties are adversaries at the polling station beyond that they are your representatives, not adversaries. They are mean to be representing their constituents best interests, not simply blindly attacking the other team no matter what.

                  Political parties are on t

        • Yes, because when antitrust enforcement actually happens (Google), big mergers that are clearly bad for the average John Q. Wallet get blocked (Kroger + Albertsons / Safeway), and the President goes out of his way to give boosts to labor that are literally unprecedented (walking picket line for UAW), that's a "presidency for the companies."

          Stop listening to right wing propaganda. You're being radicalized.

          • Again, the parties are not adversaries. The uniparty happily plays along, no real opposition. The only hopes are that enough elected representatives can turn the tide, and the president becomes independent enough to work for the people. Antitrust enforcement is a useful tool, but consider the legacy media which parrot their output in a manner that they are mirrors of each other, the social platforms and how they destroy opposition and manage conflicts, and the intelligence community controlling the governme

    • Being that Xiaomi doesn't even officially sell phones in the US [mi.com] I'm guessing you aren't going to see a whole lot of government regulation of their phones, what with them not even being FCC licensed. And that's before we get to the 95% or more of phone users that don't give a shit about unlocking their bootloader, or even know what that is.

      Nobody in Congress or the Executive Branch is going to give a single shit about one Chinese phone manufacturer with a shitty bootloader unlock policy that someone in the

      • Lots of laptops and IOT devices with closed bootlockers, and or protected eeprom or TPM hide chips. Ewaste on the rise. Obsolete devices should have NO residual rights and zero copyright for those repurposing them.

  • You will own nothing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brickhouse98 ( 4677765 ) on Friday January 03, 2025 @08:45AM (#65059379)
    Imagine getting a PC and not being able to do whatever you want with it including running another OS, etc. There is zero reason phones shouldn't be allowed to be unlocked as many times as you want and without any consent or coordination with the manufacturer.
    • You don't really have to imagine it; though on the PC side a mixture of historical, practical, and legal considerations tends to mean that the screws don't get turned too hard in ways people care about.

      There's a lot of OEM apathy, leading to key leakage and things being signed with test keys or stuff just not being validated(some OEMs are super touchy about what things perturb the PCRs and cause the TPM to freak out; some realize that life is way simpler if you just don't bother, and most customers don't

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )
        10 years ago I tried to use custom Androids on my first phones, but it was such a pain in the ass that I soon gave up. Have things improved ? Are there some models you can by and wipe and install a custom version in a few minutes just like you do with Ubuntu on a PC ?
        • If anything it is probably worse. There are still some who ship with deliberately unlockable or unlocked bootloaders, and vendor competence is...uneven...in enforcing locked-by-design; but there's still a lot of blob fuckery and samizdat-level documentation trawled out of XDAforums if you want to get more or less phone-like results; while the attempts at mainlining over at postmarketOS(while exceptionally noble) are typically ages behind unless you are counting getting a live serial terminal from an initrd

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Imagine getting a PC and not being able to do whatever you want with it.

      It's called a Mac.

      • As an Apple-hater I totally agree with your sentiment, but right now I'm posting this from Firefox on Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro.

        Difficult to agree with the content of your post is with this fact to hand.

        I have a couple of PinePhones, a Pixel with GrapheneOS, my daily driver is a OnePlus 7 series with LineageOS on it, just for the topic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Njovich ( 553857 )

          I was mostly joking and was referencing how apple makes running unsigned binaries practically impossible with upcoming changes: https://lunduke.locals.com/pos... [locals.com] .

          However, running linux on a current (M4) or previous (M3) gen apple device on the metal is actually next to impossible.

    • And yet people flock to buy such a phone, tablet, mediaplayer or smartwatch from Apple, non of which you can run your own OS on. But hee, whenever a chinese company does it, hell breaks loose. (FYI, I'm againt bootlockers).
      • Just because people support one idea doesn't mean they have a choice to implement it. There are many reasons people buy Apple products despite the lack of true ownership. (Example: Financial reasons. A.K.A. You use this phone or you're fired. Societal reasons. Can't do government mandated task without this device because they offer few if any alternatives.)

  • That's basically the future of computing if manufacturers are no longer forced to support an ancient platform that was too old to support all this DRM crap

  • I've been an Android guy sinc Moto Droid I. My phones have been unlocked, even when I bought them from VZW for $500+ each and only 30d warranty.

    Also I sued Samsung America beause they fixed my screen, but relocked my phone.

    I don't (can't) advertise these issues... because we worked them out. I can say it's an industry of scumags, and one day I' love to testify an an expert witness.

    Too late to make a differente we do what we can.

    I'm not relevant now, so call me Boomer, but that means to me a nuclear sub or

  • They're protecting their income, and pretended they're looking out for the customer(s).

    "You don't want to do what you want to do."

    "We can't make enough devices to cover demand, so we'll just punish the people who tried to benefit from it. Oh, and everybody else."

    • "Because we can." - Every capitalist company ever. See also: "Why American swindlers are allowed to get away with their thievery?" and "Why do Americans accept such horrible conditions?"

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