I want a clear explanation of the policy for supporting phones with unlocked bootloaders.

[nzeid]

There is a deeply suspicious lack of updates on the "BIOS & FIRMWARE" page. It's been a little over 6 months so far with zero updates. This effectively means that phones with unlocked bootloaders can no longer be updated. The few posts that come close acknowledging this give you the side eye and order you to relock the bootloader and use the OTA updates. This is garbage. ASUS has effectively bricked my phone if they suddenly refuse to provide updates due to unlocked bootloaders.

What is happening? I need to know if ASUS can be trusted.

[Makavelli-]

As already wrote in many other threads, I can only confirm your statements. It's really embarrassing that there is no solution and even no official statement for people who had or have a unlocked bootloader. It would be just fine if they upload the latest and greatest firmware on their website, but the June update is not the newest. So with over half a year without security updates, it's just a matter of weeks until some of the banking apps or whatever will no longer work. Should we than scrap this super "premium" phone which costs over 800€. @asus? Is that your policy? Great job then👍 Keeping In mind that the solution would be super easy, upload the file or unblock the Serial numbers from OTA blocking list ...

[nzeid]

Alright everyone, reporting back:

With some guidance from the people at XDA I have fully relocked my bootloader after reinstalling the stock ROM. However, after waiting several minutes after setup and manually checking for updates, I was still unable to get the OTA updates to kick in. I will give it one more shot tomorrow before I send it to electronics recycling, but I am confident this will fail due to the initial bootloader unlock phoning home.

The final alternative for us is to reverse-engineer the OTA update server and make these updates publicly available at our own convenience, which a few people have already started doing. But my own opinion is that we've now hopelessly crossed this line from being enabled by ASUS to do cool things with our phones to being directly at war with ASUS. I don't have the patience to fight a manufacturer with something as mission critical as my smartphone. This is precisely why the moment I knew that ASUS abandoned firmware support for my phone, I moved on to another manufacturer while I try to salvage this phone from ASUS' scam. ASUS has successfully defrauded each of us for several hundreds of dollars and we'll just have to live with it.

I will use my influence to drive everyone I know away from ASUS products and I hope this post sticks around for everyone to read and follow suit. I will also be filing complaints with several consumer advocacies.

[ToKrCZ]

I can assure anyone reading this that I have started to do the same as nzeid suggests. I help clients with pretty much anything consumer-hardware-related and so far Asus has lost just from myself over 10 000 € while I gladly went for different manufactures in cases of routers, graphics cards, motherboards, monitors and laptops.

When I see Asus logo now, I move on and do not even consider it an option. It's a scam company.

LG, Samsung, even mf BenQ looks so appealing now. Well done Asus, really well done.