INFO!!! fairphone DOES SUPPORT CUSTOM ROMS!!!
i like the idea of a fairphone. i dun wana buy one tho - if it doesn hav the features i need/wan.
if fairphone had all dis stuff - it would hav a genuine moat, besides the sustainability stff-
alternative image link (blahaj zone)
If a manufacturer wants to lock the bootloader, they can, true. But sometimes, you have phones in the same family where the Qualcomm chipset supports unlocking and the Mediatek one doesn’t. E.g. Xiaomi before they restricted unlocking further.
Don’t mistake correleation and causation. I don’t know the specifics, but bootloaders are software and socs are hardware. The bootloaders keys are fused into the hardware, so that only that bootloaders can boot. When you buy a soc, no keys are fused in, this happens at the manufacturer factory deployment process. The bootloaders can then decide if the device supports an ‘unlocked’ state, and displays the warnings if unlocked. The bootloaders are build and configured by the manufacturer. However, the soc vendors will give the product vendors a SDK containing tested sources and configuration for their soc.
Here is what could explain your observation, manufacturer is lazy and doesn’t care to change the default configuration of the bootloader. And the default configuration of Mediatek and Qualcomm SDKs are different.
There is a semi-recent thread about Mediatek at https://www.reddit.com/r/PocoPhones/comments/1cuwkm0/lies_about_mediatek/ where it started that their source code is incomplete, they don’t provide it at all. Hence no manufacturer can mainline it. And this is one of the reasons custom ROM development for them is so slow compared to Qualcomm SOCs.
Yes, as your link states, it is the product manufacturers responsibility to release the code. And if they don’t have it, they can sue Mediatek.
But very likely have access to the source, otherwise they couldn’t adapt the kernel & co. to their boards. Soc is just one part of the whole board, full of other components that need kernel configurations…
But anyway, this thread it about the kernel, we talked about the bootloader and why it cannot be unlocked, which is a separate issue.
Manufacturer needs access to the bootloader to put their Android key for the image, which contains their special apps, in place. So they have sources. To be able to flash a different bootloader, they need to be able to fuse the bootloader key into the SOC, so they have a unlocked soc. So they have everything to offer unlockable bootloaders, if they care for it.
Yeah sorry, I kind of went on a tangent.
Regarding the source, I was under the impression that manufacturers get some kind of devkit for the SoC that works against a given kernel version (one of the LTS ones Android usually uses) and binary drivers for the non-open parts. One could sue the manufacturer after buying a phone and demand release of the source, but this won’t hit meditated because the vendors won’t go after them or their license gets terminated. Legally difficult but similar to the grsecurity situation: yeah you have rights, but if you exercise them, we choose not to do business with you anymore.
Shameful situation and I think Google wanted to get out of this legal area when they developed Fuchsia as this concept would solve technical and legal issues for manufacturers.
I’m not sure where this discussion stemmed from because from my knowledge, the Fairphone does allow custom ROMs, though you lose some boot security functionality? I didn’t read too much into it yet