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Well, your first wish has some small fulfilment. I had been thinking of getting a Droid, but after reading about this, I no longer trust Motorola. Any idea if H

Well, your first wish has some small fulfilment. I had been thinking of getting a Droid, but after reading about this, I no longer trust Motorola. Any idea if HTC is better?

jrockway 16y ago
I've never had any trouble rooting my HTC phones. Rooting the Sapphire involved installing an old OTA update that had a local root hole (keep writin' those OSes in C!), exploiting that hole, and overwriting the bootloader with one that doesn't care about signatures. I don’t know the technical details about the Evo 4g, but I just flashed a firmware via the official mechanism, overwrote the bootloader, and then installed the firmware I wanted. I bet HTC's deal with Google has something to do with the ease of rooting their devices.
jsz0 16y ago
HTC is also using a protected boot loader but it's possible to replace it with a non-protected loader for now. (could change in the future though) http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=725047 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=725047
cheald 16y ago
The Nexus One has a bootloader that can be unlocked by just sending a debug command; it's very friendly to modding. Sending that command does trip a hardware flag that voids your warranty, but actually getting custom firmware onto the device is dead easy.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  So reloading the original firmware doesn't reactivate the warranty?
  - cheald 16y ago
    Correct. Unlocking the bootloader trips a hardware flag that says "This bootloader has been unlocked", which voids the warranty. To date, nobody has been able to figure out how to un-trip that flag, though there was a brief window in which you could hack a custom ROM onto the device without unlocking it, but that was patched out with FRF91. Personally, I think that's pretty reasonable, since third-party firmwares could potentially do things to the hardware that'd cause damage, and it's silly for hardware makers to promise to fix things caused by user negligence.

Well, your first wish has some small fulfilment. I had been thinking of getting a Droid, but after reading about this, I no longer trust Motorola. Any idea if HTC is better?

jrockway 16y ago

I've never had any trouble rooting my HTC phones. Rooting the Sapphire involved installing an old OTA update that had a local root hole (keep writin' those OSes in C!), exploiting that hole, and overwriting the bootloader with one that doesn't care about signatures. I don’t know the technical details about the Evo 4g, but I just flashed a firmware via the official mechanism, overwrote the bootloader, and then installed the firmware I wanted. I bet HTC's deal with Google has something to do with the ease of rooting their devices.

jsz0 16y ago

HTC is also using a protected boot loader but it's possible to replace it with a non-protected loader for now. (could change in the future though) http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=725047 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=725047

cheald 16y ago

The Nexus One has a bootloader that can be unlocked by just sending a debug command; it's very friendly to modding. Sending that command does trip a hardware flag that voids your warranty, but actually getting custom firmware onto the device is dead easy.

nitrogen 16y ago
So reloading the original firmware doesn't reactivate the warranty?
- cheald 16y ago
  Correct. Unlocking the bootloader trips a hardware flag that says "This bootloader has been unlocked", which voids the warranty. To date, nobody has been able to figure out how to un-trip that flag, though there was a brief window in which you could hack a custom ROM onto the device without unlocking it, but that was patched out with FRF91. Personally, I think that's pretty reasonable, since third-party firmwares could potentially do things to the hardware that'd cause damage, and it's silly for hardware makers to promise to fix things caused by user negligence.