Mishaal Rahman and FragmentedChicken are in South Korea for Samsung Unpacked!
It’s weird with time zones but they’ll be on for the next hour or so. They’re juggling on-the-ground stuff at the press conference so post any questions here and they’ll respond once they can!
Edit: We’ve left the hands-on area, but feel free to continue posting your questions. We’ll continue to answer them if we can, and might have another opportunity with some of the devices.
For articles about Samsung’s latest announcements, see the Megathread sticky at [email protected].
It’s pretty unfortunate. I’d love to see some regulations put into place that would ensure the option for unlockable bootloaders. North American devices are stick without the option in the first place :(.
Unlockable bootloaders aren’t a big issue - you can buy devices with unlockable bootloaders in NA, depending on your carrier - the bigger problem these days is the likes of SafteyNet and KNOX, which makes it a pain to live with an unlocked bootloader. What we really need is a change in thinking that an unlocked bootloader doesn’t necessarily mean a device is insecure, and instead of not giving the user a choice and locking them out, they should pass on the responsibility to the user. Eg, a banking app could make a user accept an agreement that the bank will not be held responsible for any hacking related losses etc, instead of straight up prevent the app from running. For this, Google needs to take the lead - they were the ones who introduced SafteyNet and caused this whole mess in the first place. Once Google takes the lead, Samsung and other manufacturers could follow, and the dev ecosystem will follow too. But I’m afraid it’s all a bit too late now, the best one could do, as an individual, is to boycott apps which use the likes of SafteyNet, leave bad reviews, complain to the CEO etc, but all this is unlikely to have any impact, given that we root/ROM users are a small minority.
I should clarify I’m referring to Samsung and their flagships. I bought my S23 Ultra directly from Samsung Canada and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader.
Why in some countries they sell their devices with unlockable bootloaders and in other countries they don’t? I can’t make sense of doing such a thing
It is worth mentioning that google does allow for re locking the bootloader on their Pixel line up on custom ROMs and unlike Samsung they did not put a fuse in the Pixels that explodes to permanently disable the device’s TEE and its security hardware