Bootloader Scam Refund

[catbottom]

Hi everyone,

I was just curious where the refunds will go for the bait and switch scam Asus ran by removing the ability to unlock bootloaders?

You know, since the phone was sold with the ability to unlock the bootloader and install your own firmware officiall from Asus themselves, something which undoubtedly was a major reason a lot of people chose to buy this phone, since it negates the issue with a shorter time for software updates than most phones.

Since it ended up being pretty much a classic bait and switch scam, like selling a phone with 12gb ram and then delivering a phone with only 4, just curious how they're going to go about refunding me for the phone. Are they going to mail me a check? Or maybe a bank transfer? Hopefully not just in store credit, right?

Weird decision though on Asus' part, to just scam a bunch of people instead of letting them do something with the hardware they bought, destroying a whole lot of brand loyalty they may have had.  I dunno though, that's just my 2 cents.

Unrelated note, anyone know any good routers with custom firmware on par with AsusWRT-Merlin that don't lose hardware acceleration? Gonna have to find a new company to buy routers from, and GPUs, and phones, and basically all kinds of hardware.

Thanks a lot.

[catbottom]

It will do you no good even though you have it downloaded and installed, because it relies on making a connection with Asus servers to decrypt things allowing for the bootloader to be unlocked. Like trying to play an online game where the servers have been shut down (which is a good comparison. Surely the servers for unlocking the bootloader would have to shut down sometime. But during the life of the product?)

And as SR2631 stated, there were other ways to unlock the bootloader on the phone that you bought and own even not using the official tool. These methods were also broken in a firmware update right around the time Asus removed the official method for unlocking the bootloader. They didn't have to be, that wasn't a consequence of some other update. That was a feature explicitly removed from the product after it had been sold to people.

And yes, there are risks. There are risks to updating the firmware in general (as you can see from the posts about the Android 14 update around here lately), but would that be enough of a reason for Asus to say "Yeah, I know we sold this phone with 3 years of software updates, we changed our mind, no more software updates" after they had sold the phone to everyone?

And, I have already searched on the net. I know a lot about this and custom firmware, it is the main reason I bought this phone when I did, being able to go to non-stock firmware after the updates stop. There is currently no practical way, not even a risky way, to unlock the bootloader on this phone. The phone that was sold with an official utility from Asus to unlock its bootloader. This may not seem like a big issue to some people, but this is a major selling point to a phone for a lot of people out there.

[landsome]

You are understandably upset by this new limitation. My point was simply that it should not be surprising to anyone companies sometimes suspend indefinitely these kind of "risky" features, which are provided as a sort of courtesy to begin with (Xiaomi, famous for its amazing custom ROM ecosystem, did it recently as well).

I think opening the BL is the kind of "feature" whose persistence no one should take for granted.

[Adegan]

Up