I’m not sure Valve have folded as much as pretending to comply for now to stall for time to work on a more strategic countermeasure that will stay long into the future.

Maybe I’m just coping but it’s the logical thing to do in the US where Valve is based, and Valve is one of the few US companies who are not always under time pressure because they are like one of the biggest companies who’s private and not publicly traded.

Yuck indeed.

People tried many ways to get around it, back when I was still using an US variant Samsung Note 9, people went as far as using a leaked engineering/preproduction ROM, which can be flashed using Samsung’s official tool because it does have the correct key for the locked bootloader to accept, being built and compiled by Samsung, and because it’s an engineering ROM it would give you root and everything despite of the bootloader still being locked.

But it was an exceptionally rare leak, and it was only meant for preproduction for a reason, it is very VERY unstable and not exactly usable for a daily driver lol

So happy I am leaving all that BS from Samsung behind with my current Sony Xperia 1 VI which is bootloader-unlocked and rooted and deeply modded and truly my own device lol

You are the only one here carrying on a grudge and being vocal about it.

Are you a big fan of FOSS? How much are you going to support FOSS developers today hmmm?

Yes yes the way Microsoft was pushing on ARM-based computers was absolutely an attempt to push for much more restrictive computers that are much more controlled by manufacturers than by their users, and I’m also really glad they are not getting far with that. I think it went hand-in-hand with their push for generative AI tools too, to make users more dependent on cloud services in the long term for the same goal.

Their failure might remove two major threats to personal general purpose computing at the same time, which would be awesome XD

I don’t know if they never found a place, they definitely had many phones that were cohesive packages of many features that specifically satisfy the needs of a clearly definable group of people, even if it’s a niche group.

The question is whether they will be able to maintain that place, and the future seems rather bleak on that lately :(

Even the non-carrier variants in the US, misleadingly called “International variants” despite of being regional to the US, have locked bootloader.

He’s not obligated to provide support but there are infinitely many ways for decline providing support without insulting someone for being an Android user, and insulting Android users in general, at the same time, literally the moment when someone sought for support.

Especially when Discord is not even inherently a support platform to begin with, Discord is a fricking instant massaging platform, this is fundamentally no different from insulting a stranger on the street the moment they started a conversation, with the most BS insult ever.

Holy shite imagine buying a PC that does NOT allow you to install Linux in it, or even to install a different version of Windows, because the UEFI/BIOS is locked. If any PC OEM who’s not Microsoft themselves trying to sell that there’s gonna be an outcry.

Why would the same be considered even remotely acceptable on Android devices?

As someone who uses Sony Xperia 1 VI, yes can confirm it’s absolutely amazing. Took me less than half a minute to unlock bootloader and root if you don’t count the time for the mandatory wipe when bootloader is unlocked (per Android design), and you literally don’t lose any OS feature other than Sony’s proprietary video enhancement feature (due to DRM key voiding and DRM level demotion with unlocked bootloader), but it’s pretty shitty anyway and only useable with the standard display mode, and if you’re using an Xperia phone you’re probably a photography/cinema/art enthusiast who would much prefer keeping the phone in the color accurate “professional” display mode anyway. And this phone comes with a very clean AOSP-like ROM with minimal customization from Sony (but those they did make are very good QoL features), so most of the Android ROM modding tools designed for Pixel phones would at least have most of the features working on the Xperia phone too, and you dont really need to worry too much about too much unexpected behaviors from OEM customizations with ROM modding, especially compares to the like of Xiaomi phones lol

But I’m not sure we genuinely have a feature with Sony smartphones. On the newer generation Sony Xperia 1 VII, Sony for the first time outsourced their flagship phones (the Xperia 1 series) to a 3rd party manufacturer instead of making them in factories which Sony owns and have direct control themselves, they have been doing this with their mid-range and budget phones before but this was the first time they did it with their flagship phones, and immediately there have been serious quality control issues resulting to many Xperia 1 VII phones failing prematurely and required motherboard replacement (according to some users who ran into issue early), and Sony later had to launch a whole recall for many of these phones: https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_announces_xperia_1_vii_replacement_program-amp-68647.php

Issues this serious and this widespread is pretty much unheard of for Sony Xperia flagship models, they may not had the most advanced features or sensible pricing, but they have always been known to have at least some of the best build quality, except longevity issues on the Samsung-made OLED screens on gen V model which was more of a Samsung’s fault and it also affected Samsung’s own phones using the same OLED screens anyway.

And all this is after they already stopped officially selling smartphones in the US and China markets with the 2024 gen VI model, which are arguably two of the biggest smartphone markets, and with the 2025 gen VII model Sony announced they are significantly downsizing their operation in the EU.

At this rate, there might now be a new Sony Xperia phone in the next 3-5 years.

But if they put a sufficiently capable chip in their phone, so that you can actually use your phone as a decent general purpose computer like how a smartphone should be like, they wouldn’t be able to force you to buy their AI services anymore would they? Lol

Also remember how they had that very big and very clear text in their ChromeOS documentation, that says “ChromeOS is NOT a general purpose computer.”? Oh boy would they not absolutely LOVE to make it exactly the same situation on Android so they can have absolute control over your interaction with the internet and profit, but alas they can’t take away too many general purpose computing features from the Android OS with a version release without losing the entire market lol, so they try it with hardware XD

Samsung only had locked bootloader in the US market because of the carrier mafias in the US having wayyyy more power than they should have, even over OEMs. They can’t charge you extra for basic features if you can bypass the artificial locks with root empowered tools, or shove adware/bloatware down your throat if you can remove them, can they?

All other market’s models always had unlocked bootloader, even their China/Hong Kong and EU models. Although it’s still not entirely open because Samsung have extremely customized ROM, that also have Samsung’s security suite Knox and Samsung Pay deeply integrated all over the place, where a lot of encryption and obfuscation were included, because they are purpose designed security solutions. So with bootloader unlock you are still going to lose a lot of core OS features (even if you don’t actually mod the boot image to have root access, and just have the bootloader unlocked), there are tools that can restore some, but not all features can be restored.

Well that is, until now, apparently.

But then, on the other hand, Samsung devices are the closest you can get to Apple’s ridiculous walled garden in the Android ecosystem, so you’d you ever want that nonsense anyway lol

Genuinely curious, why does that happen?

I’ve been dual booting Windows with Kubuntu for 7 years now, when I switched laptops I just pulled out the SSD from old laptop and shoved into the new one (I do NOT recommend this though if you don’t feel comfortable fixing all kinds of weird issues in Windows lol) so I always used the same dualboot installations. I have not had a single time when Windows bootloader would overwrite my grub and cause problem, the worst ever happened was that boot order got changed after a couple of major Windows updates so Windows bootloader was loaded on boot instead of grub, and I could always just change the boot order back in BIOS and everything is back to normal.

I do use grub-customizer although it’s not exactly a good idea these days since it’s not exactly well maintained, perhaps that might have helped since it’s customizes grub configs in nonstandard ways?

There is an Xposed module to replace the tiles back to a simple on/off toggle, for both BT tile and WiFi tile.

You need to grab your control back lol

Also if you don’t have root on your personal Android devices these days… lol may Google have mercy on you lmao (hint: they won’t lol)

Why wouldn’t you use a dedicated APK extraction app of your choice to extract the APK file, then send to another device using a file sharing method of your own choice, be it WLAN-direct or even Bluetooth, instead of using Google’s locked-in proprietary tool?

Same!!! Or niche fields of studies, although there’s a lot less serious ones of that kind lol

And nothing of value will be lost lol

Finally!

My biggest problem with bi-foldable phones so far is that they don’t actually offer enough of a screen size to really be the tablet replacement that is worth for all the downsides (like fragile screen, added weight and complexity and everything). But on the other hand it’s also just not possible to make a 10+ inches screen pocketable by folding it only once, whole still retaining an acceptable aspect ratio for both folded and unfolded forms.

Trifold is the first step towards finally having a meaningful foldable phone.

I think the problem fundamentally stems from the fact that Android development is so hardware focused nowadays because hardware makers make so much money, and people seemed to have started forgetting Android is also an OS, with its own software ecosystem, including the ecosystem of OS mods.

But we have not been seeing nearly as many news about new cool app that explores new ways to redefine functionality and UX design. There’s just not much exciting things going on in the Android software and it’s ecosystem these days it feels like, almost as if it’s not just stagneted but also somehow enshitified as a whole :(

I would not be surprised at all if this is stolen Wine/Proton/Winlator code packaged into proprietary obfuscated blobs without any license and open source attribution whatsoever.

Looking forward to seeing some investigation once it is officially released

apt: E: Invalid operation add