Xiaomi global bootloader unlock policy has changed

As an end-user having my last four phones as Xiaomi&#x27;s that get upgraded to LineageOS upon their replacement as the primary phone, this affects me in an indirect fashion:<p>I bought Xiaomi&#x27;s because they were popular for custom ROMs, and their popularity was based on decent hardware for a decent price with a boot loader that&#x27;s unlockable without too much hassle.<p>Once the bootloader unlock becomes a hassle, fewer developers will want to touch them, so their popularity for hobbyists will decline, therefore their sales will decline, leading to even further decreasing popularity amongst developers.<p>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how much difference it makes to sales, but Xiaomi will no longer be a preferred brand for me to consider. Pixels seem to be great for custom ROM compatibility, but they&#x27;re ridiculously expensive even on the second hand market. Motorola might be the new go-to.

I found a wall of shame that includes manufacturers that make it hard or impossible to unlock the bootloader[1]. It was mentioned in a forum post[2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;melontini&#x2F;bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;melontini&#x2F;bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;future-of-unlocking-bootloaders-in-android-smartphones.4705741&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;future-of-unlocking-bootloaders-in-a...</a>

For context, Xiaomi first implemented this policy to combat a plague of devices that were being sold at retail with malware preinstalled. In the middle-income markets that Xiaomi considers home turf, a large proportion of phones are bought from independent retailers rather than major chains, so Xiaomi have limited control over the onward supply chain. While this policy might seem like a pointless annoyance to the kind of person who installs custom ROMs on their phone, it&#x27;s a careful attempt to balance the freedoms of power users against the security of ordinary users.

I&#x27;m a custom ROM developer that spans a lot of devices (TrebleDroid GSI, a generic kind of custom ROM that works on thousands of Android devices) I&#x27;ve bought dozens of smartphones to implement bug fixes (current total number is 50).<p>I used to buy Xiaomi devices, because there are a lot of users (lots of bugs to fix), and often have brand new SoC at affordable price early. But I&#x27;ve stopped buying Xiaomi for a few years now, because of the low reliability, high complexity of Xiaomi&#x27;s bootloader unlock, and the rules keep changing.<p>So far it looks like the community of people using Xiaomi devices with custom ROM is still pretty strong, so it&#x27;s not necessarily a bad idea to buy Xiaomi. But I very strongly recommend that you unlock bootloader right after buying your device [1], because buying a device now and expecting to be able to unlock it in 4 years look too optimistic to me.<p>[1] Though you&#x27;ll most likely won&#x27;t be able to &quot;just&quot; unlock and forget it, because of all the apps that really really really want you to run Xiaomi and Google adwares and not your own OS

I know it’s off topic but this post reeks of LLM-generated content. The itemized lists with bold two word headings are a dead giveaway.

Don&#x27;t Chromebooks already do a nag on every boot if they&#x27;re unlocked?<p>Why not do it on phones too? It&#x27;s not like they get rebooted very often. That would totally combat the &quot;compromised phone sold as clean&quot; issue.

How do they uniquely identify individual end users? In other words, is anything stopping me from creating a new account for each device I want to unlock?

In addition to this, Google is phasing out device integrity check to the Play Integrity API, which will completely kill custom ROMs if apps adopt it, which bank apps most likely will, because their entire security is based on box-checking.

I feel like governments should enforce unlocked bootloaders on consumer devices. If I want to install a different OS on my phone, TV, fridge, whatever, I should be allowed to

Anyway allowing to unlock the bootloader without providing the updated and complete kernel source code is useless for ROM development.<p>That&#x27;s what they do with most of their device, I don&#x27;t think there is much lineage os official support for the recent phone (3-4 years old) and the unofficial are made from patched kernel with a little bit of code from a phone, a little bit from another, etc.<p>Xiaomi was and is pretty much dead for rom development, i don&#x27;t know who keep repeating that online but they obviously haven&#x27;t been paying much attention.

Look on the bright side. Locking bootloaders has the potential to break the duopoly by driving more people towards Linux phones or other unlocked devices. The more people that move, the stronger those communities get. I&#x27;ve been daily driving a Furi for 3 months now and am glad to have options outside of the duopoly.

i can easily get another sim card to get around the limit as an end user. this only affects people who want to buy devices en masse and would have to get a sim card each. and even that is not that hard if you compare the cost of a sim to the cost of a phone.<p>the annoying thing about xiaomi unlocking is the random wait time. when my mother visited a few years ago, i got her her first smartphone that i wanted to install &#x2F;e&#x2F;OS on. i remembered my own wait time was a week, so i figured i&#x27;d have enough time while my mom was here. when i started the unock process i realized that the wait time was randomized and this time i got two weeks. luckily that still left me one day before my mother had to leave so i managed, but if the wait time would have been just a few days more i would have been unable to set up the phone for her.

On the one hand, Xiaomi is enough popular to do such kind of good thing to attract attention for geeks.<p>On the other hand, this can reduce the risk of fraud and cost of anti-fraud, especially when cost of phone is becoming lower and lower.

The biggest problem with Xiaomi&#x27;s original ROMs is the crazy amount of ads. And they don&#x27;t even offer a subscription-based business model to avoid them. The hardware is good these days, but the software is not.

Is it me or does this blogs content seem AI generated?

The old one device policy