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.
I guarantee you that, given your requirements, this will never be a product that you can buy.
Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.
Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.
The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.
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.
This has nothing to do with the unlocking though. Unlocking a OnePlus phone is just standard procedure and requires no involvement by the manufacturer.
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
This was not going to come from Samsung, one of the most over-zealous companies out there when it comes from preventing rolling out purely software features from today's phones to yesterday's. E.g. "Now Bar" a literal online feature is blocked on older phones. (Don't get me wrong, it's a useless feature, just shows their thinking)
Or when they announced that "Linux on Dex", for which they had been doing public beta testing on Note 9 phones, would only support the just-released Note 10. (And then they dropped the entire thing anyway).
These are phones for which the only difference between generations may be a couple mAh in the battery. Yet they still use software to gate features.
> 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?
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.
Apple only uses Qualcomm chips as modems. Almost everyone else uses Qualcomm chips as main SoCs.
Now, could hardware vendors tell Qualcomm to go pound sand and run their own support for old SoCs? Yes they could. Do they want to? Hell no, supporting old devices doesn't make any money.
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).
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..
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.
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)
Modern phones pack a good bit of compute, and can run things like VLAs decently well.
Of course, that would require today's phones to age out of "being used as a phone" bracket, and robotics VLAs to become actually useful. But things like the Comma AI autopilot hardware use slightly obsolete smartphone chips internally - so it's not like it's impossible to run a useful AI on this kind of HW.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hardware projects live and die on scale. The engineering and tooling costs are a similar order of magnitude whether you make 1000 phones or 1,000,000. If you can guarantee that you have an accessible market for a million devices, then you're starting to get into the region of scale where this would be an OK idea.
Mind you, that's a million users who are cool with all the design tradeoffs you had to make to ingress protection, software performance with modern android, and form factor in order to get your desirable characteristic.
The Punkt MP02 is at roughly the price point and "niche-ness" as the product you describe here, and that sold for almost $400. They could afford to build in about the same amount of functionality as a Nokia brick of yore (but with 4G radios!) for that price.
But I main the $900 pixel.
They are so similar its weird, but Motorola was slow with snapchat and the keyboard some time.
Can we do 2010s phones with 2020s battery tech and modems please?
Pinephone and Librem 5 (my daily driver) do not have a locked bootloader in the first place. They are just little (GNU/)Linux computers.
[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
Bootloader unlocking should be a basic consumer right, and if Linux went GPLv3, it would be closer to reality.
Or when they announced that "Linux on Dex", for which they had been doing public beta testing on Note 9 phones, would only support the just-released Note 10. (And then they dropped the entire thing anyway).
These are phones for which the only difference between generations may be a couple mAh in the battery. Yet they still use software to gate features.
Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?
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.
Now, could hardware vendors tell Qualcomm to go pound sand and run their own support for old SoCs? Yes they could. Do they want to? Hell no, supporting old devices doesn't make any money.
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).
How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.
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..
They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.
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.
Good reminder that companies so large are never a good thing.
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...
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.
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.
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)
Of course, that would require today's phones to age out of "being used as a phone" bracket, and robotics VLAs to become actually useful. But things like the Comma AI autopilot hardware use slightly obsolete smartphone chips internally - so it's not like it's impossible to run a useful AI on this kind of HW.
Do you happen to know what kind of performance you can expect? Or perhaps a better way?
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.
Did we accidentally time travel again?
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.