Sony Does the Unthinkable: Offers Official Option for Bootloader Access on Select Phones

[dgstorm]

In one fell swoop Sony may have just become the most developer friendly smartphone maker on the planet (or at least one of them). They officially opened up bootloader access for several of their current Android smartphones. Sony's official Mobile Flash tool now gives folks an “Open Devices” bootloader option to go along with the standard consumer-shipped bootloader.

Developers can now install custom recoveries directly on their devices’ recovery partition, and/or lets folks use custom ROMs and operating systems without needing clunky bootstrap solutions. For now it only supports devices with chipsets based on ARM Cortex-A7. This limits it to the Sony Xperia T3, Sony Xperia M2, Sony Xperia T2 Ultra and the Sony Xperia E3 for now. We will keep an eye out to see if they open up the same access to older or newer phones.

Here's a link to the flash tool: Flash tool for Xperia devices Developer World

 

[wicked]

This is great news. Thanks @dgstorm!

 

[dgstorm]

Hopefully they will extend this to all of their devices!

 

[FoxKat]

We would hope, but that may be a limitation of the specific chipset, specific carrier, or some other limiatation beyond their control.

Just the fact it's specific to ARM Cortex-A7 devices suggests a limitation for that processor only.