Slight tangent, but I find it mind boggling that so few phones offer bootloader unlocking - which is essential if you truly want to own your phone.
I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.
That's... a shockingly small list!? .
In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!
Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.
To take this a step further. I want a phone that is small (doesn't have to be tiny, just iPhone SE 2020 or smaller, please), has a replaceable battery, has an unlocked bootloader, has a headphone jack, and costs $400 or less.
It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.
Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.
But I main the $900 pixel.
They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
Does the OnePlus process work for people? They've got a form that allows you to beg them to let you unlock your phone, but it's never worked for me. Motorola works similarly but it does work, which is why I stick with them.
Is this country-specific? I've owned plenty of OnePlus devices over the years and the have all being unlockable without any issues, or without having to ask anything from anyone.
At some point OnePlus announced that they will stop sharing firmware blobs. Lineage os team announced that they will be dropping the support. Then after another few years they were back. I remember because I bought 3 and I was planning to stay with that brand because of easy unlock (via ADB), decent price and good Lineage support. Probably OnePlus reconsidered this at some point. Right now fairly new ones have support. Maybe OP was unlucky and bought one of those models from this period of time.
Although I don't agree with the FSF's way of advocating it [1], I do believe that unlocking the bootloader should be a customer's basic right. You don't truly own your device if you cannot control the software you run with it.
[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
> Meanwhile, Samsung's own recycling numbers tell a different story. Its old phone collection campaign, running since 2015, had collected just 38,000 phones as of May 2019. Samsung had sold 2 billion Galaxy devices by February 2019.
Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?
My guess, is it boils down to legal liability. Every time I look into repurposing my old smartphones, I inevitably go down the "well, it probably won't burn my house down… but. " It's the same reason why I don't use Molex-to-SATA power adapters, even though I could save a few bucks. Regardless, Samsung ghosting iFixit is inexcusable.
> In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project
How about good PR.
This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.
Even good PR is an investment in the brand which can be profitable.
The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..
Welcome to capitalism? Companies exist to make money. If they don't then they are charity. Spending a ton of money on the dev time to strip out all the code and sanitize it to appease what was at the time a slowly dying community fun project is not a wise investment.
1. These use cases will be much better served by a dedicated device. One that can last much longer, be better supported and cost much cheaper. The market is full of them. So using an old phone is impractical when taking the market into account. It's like running an old Sony Vaio as your dedicate Pihole server. You COULD do that, but it's not the smartest move.
2. The good PR was the announcement. It's not like everyone has a drawer full of Galaxy S3 phones that they are itching to create a custom OS and bespoke software for. Nor would be news when an old device gets opened up since it's not going to generate clicks outside the most niche environments.
3. The community just isn't there. Even large projects like GrapheneOS and LineageOS rely on volunteers to maintain devices. That support is not equal across the board and requires specialized knowledge and dedicated. Something that most people don't want to do for free in their spare time.
It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.
> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!
We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.
You wrote that like there is no other way. Yes there is. For example I would not consider a job that would consist of writing a malware But I have conscience and doing something like that would make me uncomfortable. Even when I think about myself as more capitalist than socialist.
Snark aside, why are the entirely functional devices obsolete? It's because the growing demands of the endless software bloat, web bloat, feature bloat. New wireless technologies and better protocols, sure, but I've been using software for 35 years and the software contribution to this mess really gets me down.
Part of the reason why Android phones specifically are not supported for very long is because the baseband and modem firmwares from Qualcomm only receive official support and updates for about 2 years.
My assumption is that Apple has a better contract with Qualcomm, being their biggest customer (for now, until they completely move over to their custom modems). Apple probably also has been abstracting the firmware from the start inside iOS, while Android didn't until project treble.
Samsung & Pixel are now offering 7 years of updates for flagships, so it would seem it's no longer a hardware/support limitation and purely a financial decision by other android manufacturers, and by Samsung for their non S-series of phones.
TL;DR OEMs are deliberately choosing to not support their devices, not due to any limitations anymore (thanks to project treble).
I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!
I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.
I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.
Why are korean tech companies so toxic? Samsung, LG, SK etc all the same. Doesn’t matter if they sell you a phone, a TV, or a refrigator there is something inherently wrong how korean companies are treating the customers.
This question hinges on the fact that they are the dominant brands in the US and some other markets, which is not true when you look at China or India. They benefit from lack of competition.
Now, if you ask me why there is a lack of competition of phone brands in the US, I have a TED talk to give...
I can't really think of a tech company that does not hate its users. Yes of course there's Framework, but I mean large tech companies. It's all glued shut, proprietary, planned obsolescence, AI slop-ified, privacy invasive and over priced. Feel free to add to the list.
Related anecdote: My old washing machine is about to die, and I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day. He told me, with much excitement, about his new washing machine with AI, and a smartphone app where he can program his own washing cycles. I... just don't feel like I belong on the same planet as this person. It's the polar opposite of what I want.
You can go a long way with just Termux. You can upcycle old phones by installing or building code in Termux to turn the phones into a compute grid, AI inference nodes, file servers, compute servers, web servers.
Are phones any good for that? (I agree with the rest, and I'm a big fan of termux, I just wouldn't have thought of a phone - especially an old phone - as a useful way to run AI)
I was actually just going to do that with an old Galaxy S24. Seems like there's no easy way to add something like docker. Best I can find is to try to use qemu to get a full Linux VM.
Do you happen to know what kind of performance you can expect? Or perhaps a better way?
Am I a fool to think that upcycled devices might not dent the sales of new devices, but would be used in new ways that would actually be positive for the vendor?
I think any effect on Samsung, positive or negative, would be negligible. It would help their PR slightly, but mostly among a relatively small part of their customer base.
On the negative side, it would probably have a minor impact on the number of new phones sold if old ones were able to be "refurbished" in this way. Again, probably not significant, but if it's even a penny cash flow negative, why invest their resources in it?
Overall the only significant gain to be made is the announcement because it can be spun and quoted to the average consumer as Samsung being more eco-friendly. It's akin to enabling consumerism, and consumers generally don't go to check if companies were telling the truth about this stuff.
And then they completely removed bootloader unlocking with OneUI 8, in many cases increasing the anti-rollback version so you can't even downgrade.. I can't wait for them to go out of business..
I really dislike how people consider Android a Linux operating system. It's incredibly misleading and serves as more marketing than substance. If it were, then the Samsung Upcycle program would be ready to go.
Because it is. Android runs a modified Linux kernel. There's nothing misleading about it at all, unless you think "Linux" means something that it does not.
Slight tangent, but I find it mind boggling that so few phones offer bootloader unlocking - which is essential if you truly want to own your phone.
I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.
That's... a shockingly small list!? .
In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!
Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.
FxTec Pro1 comes with an unlocked bootloader, and a slide-out keyboard for the true 2010 experience!
To take this a step further. I want a phone that is small (doesn't have to be tiny, just iPhone SE 2020 or smaller, please), has a replaceable battery, has an unlocked bootloader, has a headphone jack, and costs $400 or less.
It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.
Have you looked at Motorola? I'm not sure they have all of those features, but me and you think similarly and when I did research, I ended up choosing their $130 phone for my contractors.
But I main the $900 pixel.
They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
Is there an up-to-date list of their phones which allow bootloader unlocking? Not all of them do..
Most 2012 era used phones will work here. Pick one off eBay.
Batteries will be in bad shape.
Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?
'replaceable battery'
> (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus
Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.
Does the OnePlus process work for people? They've got a form that allows you to beg them to let you unlock your phone, but it's never worked for me. Motorola works similarly but it does work, which is why I stick with them.
Is this country-specific? I've owned plenty of OnePlus devices over the years and the have all being unlockable without any issues, or without having to ask anything from anyone.
At some point OnePlus announced that they will stop sharing firmware blobs. Lineage os team announced that they will be dropping the support. Then after another few years they were back. I remember because I bought 3 and I was planning to stay with that brand because of easy unlock (via ADB), decent price and good Lineage support. Probably OnePlus reconsidered this at some point. Right now fairly new ones have support. Maybe OP was unlucky and bought one of those models from this period of time.
Motorola? Is there an up-to-date list of devices where they're "so kind" as to allow bootloader unlocking? Because it's a lottery to me..
Although I don't agree with the FSF's way of advocating it [1], I do believe that unlocking the bootloader should be a customer's basic right. You don't truly own your device if you cannot control the software you run with it.
[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
One of the very few genuinely bad takes Linus had.
Bootloader unlocking should be a basic consumer right, and if Linux went GPLv3, it would be closer to reality.
> Meanwhile, Samsung's own recycling numbers tell a different story. Its old phone collection campaign, running since 2015, had collected just 38,000 phones as of May 2019. Samsung had sold 2 billion Galaxy devices by February 2019.
Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?
My guess, is it boils down to legal liability. Every time I look into repurposing my old smartphones, I inevitably go down the "well, it probably won't burn my house down… but. " It's the same reason why I don't use Molex-to-SATA power adapters, even though I could save a few bucks. Regardless, Samsung ghosting iFixit is inexcusable.
> In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project
How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.
Even good PR is an investment in the brand which can be profitable.
The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..
>How about good PR.
They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.
And more bad PR. I am not sure it was worth it.
Welcome to capitalism? Companies exist to make money. If they don't then they are charity. Spending a ton of money on the dev time to strip out all the code and sanitize it to appease what was at the time a slowly dying community fun project is not a wise investment.
1. These use cases will be much better served by a dedicated device. One that can last much longer, be better supported and cost much cheaper. The market is full of them. So using an old phone is impractical when taking the market into account. It's like running an old Sony Vaio as your dedicate Pihole server. You COULD do that, but it's not the smartest move.
2. The good PR was the announcement. It's not like everyone has a drawer full of Galaxy S3 phones that they are itching to create a custom OS and bespoke software for. Nor would be news when an old device gets opened up since it's not going to generate clicks outside the most niche environments.
3. The community just isn't there. Even large projects like GrapheneOS and LineageOS rely on volunteers to maintain devices. That support is not equal across the board and requires specialized knowledge and dedicated. Something that most people don't want to do for free in their spare time.
It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
> Welcome to capitalism?
Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.
> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!
We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.
You wrote that like there is no other way. Yes there is. For example I would not consider a job that would consist of writing a malware But I have conscience and doing something like that would make me uncomfortable. Even when I think about myself as more capitalist than socialist.
No of course there are other ways. I didn't mean to imply that in the least.
Why not keep using them as...phones?
Snark aside, why are the entirely functional devices obsolete? It's because the growing demands of the endless software bloat, web bloat, feature bloat. New wireless technologies and better protocols, sure, but I've been using software for 35 years and the software contribution to this mess really gets me down.
Part of the reason why Android phones specifically are not supported for very long is because the baseband and modem firmwares from Qualcomm only receive official support and updates for about 2 years.
For everyone? I mean it doesn’t seem to apply to Apple, need it apply to Google or Samsung?
My assumption is that Apple has a better contract with Qualcomm, being their biggest customer (for now, until they completely move over to their custom modems). Apple probably also has been abstracting the firmware from the start inside iOS, while Android didn't until project treble.
Samsung & Pixel are now offering 7 years of updates for flagships, so it would seem it's no longer a hardware/support limitation and purely a financial decision by other android manufacturers, and by Samsung for their non S-series of phones.
TL;DR OEMs are deliberately choosing to not support their devices, not due to any limitations anymore (thanks to project treble).
The screen broke on my S24 but I'd still like to use the compute, ram and storage.
I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!
I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.
I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.
> 76 points by 1970-01-01 2 hours ago
Did we accidentally time travel again?
Why are korean tech companies so toxic? Samsung, LG, SK etc all the same. Doesn’t matter if they sell you a phone, a TV, or a refrigator there is something inherently wrong how korean companies are treating the customers.
When Samsung accounts for almost 25% of South Korea's GDP they are allowed to do whatever they want, and they will set the tone and consumer approach.
Good reminder that companies so large are never a good thing.
Same thing with Verizon wireless, who dominated the US cell phone market. Openly hostile "customer service".
This question hinges on the fact that they are the dominant brands in the US and some other markets, which is not true when you look at China or India. They benefit from lack of competition.
Now, if you ask me why there is a lack of competition of phone brands in the US, I have a TED talk to give...
Most handset manufacturers are like this, don't think it's specific to samsung
Are Korean tech companies more toxic than, say, American tech companies?
Doubtful. I can't think of a company that clearly hates its users more than Microsoft or Meta.
I'd say it's the tech industry as a whole that's toxic. And long overdue for a reckoning.
I can't really think of a tech company that does not hate its users. Yes of course there's Framework, but I mean large tech companies. It's all glued shut, proprietary, planned obsolescence, AI slop-ified, privacy invasive and over priced. Feel free to add to the list.
Related anecdote: My old washing machine is about to die, and I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day. He told me, with much excitement, about his new washing machine with AI, and a smartphone app where he can program his own washing cycles. I... just don't feel like I belong on the same planet as this person. It's the polar opposite of what I want.
This is why legislation matters, capitalism cannot sort out such misbehaviors when the public keeps giving money to the same bad actors.
You can go a long way with just Termux. You can upcycle old phones by installing or building code in Termux to turn the phones into a compute grid, AI inference nodes, file servers, compute servers, web servers.
> AI inference nodes
Are phones any good for that? (I agree with the rest, and I'm a big fan of termux, I just wouldn't have thought of a phone - especially an old phone - as a useful way to run AI)
I was actually just going to do that with an old Galaxy S24. Seems like there's no easy way to add something like docker. Best I can find is to try to use qemu to get a full Linux VM.
Do you happen to know what kind of performance you can expect? Or perhaps a better way?
Am I a fool to think that upcycled devices might not dent the sales of new devices, but would be used in new ways that would actually be positive for the vendor?
I think any effect on Samsung, positive or negative, would be negligible. It would help their PR slightly, but mostly among a relatively small part of their customer base.
On the negative side, it would probably have a minor impact on the number of new phones sold if old ones were able to be "refurbished" in this way. Again, probably not significant, but if it's even a penny cash flow negative, why invest their resources in it?
Overall the only significant gain to be made is the announcement because it can be spun and quoted to the average consumer as Samsung being more eco-friendly. It's akin to enabling consumerism, and consumers generally don't go to check if companies were telling the truth about this stuff.
And then they completely removed bootloader unlocking with OneUI 8, in many cases increasing the anti-rollback version so you can't even downgrade.. I can't wait for them to go out of business..
I really dislike how people consider Android a Linux operating system. It's incredibly misleading and serves as more marketing than substance. If it were, then the Samsung Upcycle program would be ready to go.
Because it is. Android runs a modified Linux kernel. There's nothing misleading about it at all, unless you think "Linux" means something that it does not.