Comment by drnick1
4 hours ago
> What do OnePlus gain from this? Can someone explain me what are the advantages of OnePlus doing all this?
They don't want the hardware to be under your control. In the mind of tech executives, selling hardware does not make enough money, the user must stay captive to the stock OS where "software as a service" can be sold, and data about the user can be extracted.
A bit overdramatic, isn't it? Custom ROMs designed for the new firmware revisions still work fine. Only older ROMs with potentially vulnerable bootloader code cause bricking risks.
Give ROM developers a few weeks and you can boot your favourite custom ROMs again.
Not really dramatic IMO. Basically mirrors everything we have seen in other industries like gaming consoles, etc. that have destroyed ownership over time in favor of "service models" instead.
And now governments are starting to take advantage of that loss of control by demanding surveillance tech like chatcontrol and other backdoors.
> In the mind of tech executives
To be fair, they are right: the vast majority of users don't give a damn. Unfortunately I do.
Sure if you want to compete against Google or Samsung. Maybe that is the plan that one plus has. My understanding was that they were going after a different Market of phone users that might want a little bit more otherwise why not just go with one of the other people that will screw you just as hard for less.
Note that Google also forces this indirectly via their "certification" - if the device doesn't have unremovable AVB (requires qualcomm secure boot fuse to be blown) then it's not even allowed to say the device runs Android.. if you see "Android™" then it means secure boot is set up and you don't have the keys, you can't set up your own, so you don't really own the SoC you paid for..