Some of you may know I’ve been involved in Android since 2010. You may also know that I’ve been a fixture at droidforums.net since February of that same year. During this time I’ve seen/heard ALL kinds of speculation, and hearsay on this bootloader issue that developers on all Motorola phones face. In 2009, when the Motorola Droid was released, there was a lot of excitement about Android. Verizon Wireless made some exceptional advertisements on television and the internet. “DROID Does!” They would say. Well, I’ll tell you first hand, it did just that.
The Droid gave us unlimited control over our phone. It wasn’t a Nexus, so it didn’t get updates direct from Google, but it had an unlocked bootloader and was easily rooted. Anyone who was looking for a development device went for the Droid. As consumers, we got kernels, ROMs, themes, scripts and the like. There were no less than 20 ROMs listed on Droidforums. There were themers porting themes to other ROMs when they gained more popularity. It really was the time to have a Droid.
On the flip side, you had people who weren’t up on the “how-to’s” and the write ups of how to get these things installed properly, soft-bricking the Droid; they would return the phone to get a new one and start over again. While I don’t agree that this was the only deciding factor in Motorola’s decision for the future, it had to be a part of it. All future retail Motorola phones were bootloader locked and encrypted. As the devices continued releasing, the forums were abuzz with questions like “can we root it?” and “is it unlocked?” To which the answer, on release day, was usually no. Droid X, 2, 2G, R2D2, X2, 3, Bionic, 4, RAZR, RAZR MAXX, on Verizon Wireless were all locked. Then came the newest iteration.
Here we are, present day. The newest available from Motorola are the RAZR M, RAZR HD and RAZR HD MAXX. Up until Sunday, you had root via MotoFail and custom recovery via Hashcode. However, Dan Rosenberg, recently of Android fame for rooting the last generation of OMAP powered devices, has actually reverse engineered the code required to unlock the bootloader. These devices run on Qualcomm processors now, while the OMAP versions are not unlockable.
I personally think this is a sharp slap in the face to Motorola. There have been petitions started, campaigns on Twitter, and any number of social avenues explored. The community asked for a device that would be similar to the Droid, and now, we have 3 (4 if you count the Atrix HD which is part of the offering), without Motorola’s consent. These phones are now fetching top dollar on Swappa, eBay and the like. Hopefully this shows Motorola (Google) that this is what people want. They want the freedom to do what they like with a device they’ve purchased.
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