- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Update from Asus
The service team reply misunderstood the situation. Unlock tool is unavailable at this moment but we are allowing the possibility to unlock, please stay tuned.
**TL;DR
- ASUS has apparently withdrawn the ability to unlock the bootloader on its phones.
- As per the company’s technical support team, Zenfone 10 and Zenfone 9 users won’t be able to root their phones.
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Oh, fuck off. I’m not one to root my phone, but you own the damn thing. Once it’s in your hands, the maker should have no right to tell you what to do with it.
Yeah, I’m really tired of this.
We should be able to root and install any OS on our phones like we can do on PC.
I don’t use root or custom ROMs on my phone anymore but this is something that should always be possible.
Consumers seem to be too dumb for their own good.
Regulators seem to be too captured for consumers’ good.
Why do so many phone manufacturers hate letting you unlock their bootloaders? Every Google phone lets you do this, and they probably have the most secure Androids of them all.
Google shouldn’t be our shining light on phone rules lol
pixels are by far the best to degoogled your phone and to have privacy/security/freedom actually
they go above and beyond letting you unlock your bootloader
Oneplus? Bootloader is easily unlocked and it can be debloated easily after root
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This 100%
Rooting is a terrible security risk and there’s no point in doing it. You won’t see the popular roms like GrapheneOS, /e/, or CalyxOS supporting it.
Lol this is the technology page and you’re going to try to make the argument to not root(/jailbreak) a phone?.. Genuinely lold
Yes…? You can have custom roms without sacrificing security. There’s genuinely no reason to root anymore.
Can’t tell if troll or not
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See why GrapheneOS only supports pixels
Very easy way to remove an almost perfect phone from my list of upgrade considerations.
Exactly !!
ASUS is apparently killing the posibility of me being a potential customer of their smartphones.
Rooting users are only a small percentage of all users so they probably won’t even notice unfortunately.
sent from rooted phone
… aaaand another brand I’ll be avoiding when looking for a new phone. In my eyes a phone that can’t be rooted is kind of like a computer without access to an administrator account - you can do stuff with it, but at one point your hands are tied.
asus has killed the possibility of me being a potential customer then lol
I still don’t buy Sony over the rootkit escapade and that was nearly 30 years ago.
I bought their Zenfone 5 in 15 and I always chose ASUS MoBos whenever I need to upgrade. Not anymore.
A typical example of planned obsolescence what an effective way of killing my plans to get an Asus phone as my next daily driver assuming this is true
Some important context from the article:
A Reddit user claims that the company’s developer liaison on its Telegram channel has no knowledge of any such development. “According to them, the unlock tool server is in maintenance and will resume in Q3,” the person writes; We’ve written to ASUS to clarify the situation and will update this article when and if we hear more.
But here is the thing why do I need to use a tool to connect to a server just to be allowed to unlock the bootloader? I don’t and didn’t need such a thing to unlock the bootloader of my Samsung Galaxy phone (planned obsolescence ladies and gentlemen)
But here is the thing why do I need to use a tool to connect to a server just to be allowed to unlock the bootloader
It’s been this way since I first flashed a custom ROM on my 2011 Xperia and I’ve never gotten it. It seems so useless. Either Huawei or Xiaomi wanted me to provide a REASON for unlocking.
I think Nexus phones were unlockable without making a request to a server. I might be wrong though. But I do miss the Nexus line.
Pixel devices don’t require permission via a server. Unlocking is enabled via developer settings on the device.
Doing it any other way is user-hostile.
Unless you get Verizon’ed that is
Which means, legally, you can no longer own even the hardware of a Zenfone you bought, you now only license it. Since their OEM software is proprietary and in nearly every software’s TOS they can revoke your license to it at any time for any reason, which would effectively brick the phone if bootloader unlocking is not possible.
In a while ASUS won’t be able to sell its phones in the EU. I guarantee it.
I really hope the EU requires manufacturers to allow a bootloader unlock. Apple would shit themselves.
It’s funny that looking around almost every single piece of ASUS hardward I bought over the years, I chose them because I could do more with their kit than I could do with the cheaper stuff and a lot of that had to do with access to the hardware (overclockeability of things like motherboards and graphics boards, much more configurable and better hardware for routers and media players and so on).
So I’m wandering what exactly is their unique value proposition on smartphones versus brands which are much more well known and well established in the regular consumer segment if they’re ditching being the superior choice for the more technical users: what exactly is the point of “same shit as everybody else” hardware for premium prices?!
Didn’t even know they were great for it, but my motherboard has been a sexy beast for for iommu grouping
The problem with companies trying to stop this is the fact that there will be at least one person/team who will find a way to bypass this.
No amount of corporate software devs/engineers can stop the might of a determined team on the internet from achieving their goals when it comes to this kinda stuff.
This is just simply not the case. There are multiple phones that have no known bootloader bypass to this day. Sk17i springs immediately to mind.
The updated response from Asus:
The service team reply misunderstood the situation. Unlock tool is unavailable at this moment but we are allowing the possibility to unlock, please stay tuned.
So the server is down and will be back up. But that is not exactly the most reassuring response. It kind of seems like they are planning on removing it later or majorly altering it.
I can’t believe this shit… I was planning on getting the Zenfone 10. with it’s headphone jack, small size, and Android feel.
So they will just be bricks in a few years
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Also, something I don’t see people discuss enough: for security, you also need to be able to re-lock the bootloader after installing a custom ROM. Otherwise anyone can inject code into the system partition if they have physical access to your device, which would also compromise your encrypted storage. So if there’s no way to reverse the bootloader unlocking, that’s also bad.
Well there goes any compelling reason to buy their phones lol
I was genuinely thinking about going with an ASUS phone next because of the unlockable bootloader, this really sucks to see.
Same here. Well they lost a potential costumer.
