Comment by AnthonyMouse

> It reduces the expected value of stealing a phone, which reduces the demand for stolen phones.

It's not at all obvious that this is what happens. To begin with, do you regard the average phone thief as someone who even knows what expected value is?

They want drugs so they steal phones until they get enough money to buy drugs. If half the phones can't be resold then they need to steal twice as many phones to get enough money to buy drugs; does that make phone thefts go down or up?

On top of that, the premise is ridiculous. You don't need to lock the boot loader or prevent people from installing third party software to prevent stolen phones from being used. Just establish a registry for the IMEI of stolen phones so that carriers can consult the registry and refuse to provide service to stolen phones.

It's entirely unrelated to whether or not you can install a custom ROM and is merely being used as an excuse because "prevent theft somehow" sounds vaguely like a legitimate reason when the actual reason of "prevent competition" does not.