All of this is nonsense
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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At this point, bricking a smartphone by flashing dodgy ROMs is a rite of passage.
Edit: at least it was before everyone started bootlocking like assholes...
Amen
You can unlock the bootloader of almost any phone in the EU.
Now, there will be literally no custom firmware for it, but its still possible.
Well, that would be nice, but it's still not all of them. Unfortunately, I own a Zenfone 10 as my main driver, and Asus have not released the unlock tools they promised since Zenfone 9. And, afaik, this is applicable to a lot of the top producers, with a few exceptions.
I can't wait for the new regulations to properly settle in, hopefully we'll start seeing full unlocks with the upcoming generations...
Not sure if this is joke or not because that warning about xiaome service center in India is absolutely true.
God it's so horrendous. I thought Micromax customer service was terrible but then Xiaomi arrived...
Or -- hear me out -- restore shit yourself via edl
Say, how come this? I've installed Linux-based OSs onto laptops without much care in the world, yet I feel like trying a custom ROM on Android requires me to check for ROM compatibiliy with my device and brings risk of bricking
So to provide further context, PCs have tables that can be checked to see what hardware is located where. Phones don't have this, and if you try to query the wrong component or the right component at the wrong address, you can crash the whole device.
PCs were this way too, before PnP/PCI/ACPI tech showed up.
Loading Linux on a Pentium with a bunch of ISA cards was NOT a guaranteed win.
The pc ecosystem is modular by design. The kernel will figure out itself the available hardware, moreover there are only two major CPU manufacturers (in the pc space of course), which means you have only two platforms to support.
Mobile phones instead are not modular, they use SoC. While most common socs are from Qualcomm and mediatek, there are a lot more smaller manufacturers. Plus, even if most often they use the same reference design for compute cores, the rest of the soc is often custom and wildly different from others. All of this to say that the kernel needs to already know exactly how the specific soc of the device works, instead of figuring it out on the fly. Which is why you need to check compatibility.
The brick thing instead is because the bootloaders in these devices are usually very locked down, so sometimes you need to replace the bootloader with a more open one, with all the risks that this entails
Yeah, I really wish it wasn't like this, but replacing a phone's OS is a lot more like flashing a custom bios than installing an OS on a hard drive.
I would think the pre-known hardware configuration would make boots near instant. I never understood why this isn't so.
The hardware still needs to be brought up and initialised. But the software is the real problem here. The kernel gets fully up in seconds, but then you have to initialize the rest of the OS
I think i've read something about (pseudo-)RISC architectures not allowing universal drivers for whole families, each must exactly match to the hardware.
Need to make that in an HD picture for my lock screen
I remember bricking my Xiaomi as it were yesterday. Flashed the firmware for a Poco F4 on a Poco F1 because I was too dumb to read.
I looked for a fix a long time, the final solution was to throw it into the fucking trash. . .
Tap for spoiler
Of course I recycled it
Chat is this real?
No
That’s a joke, right?
No this is Patrik
what Xiaomi service center could do?
The SoC on the motherboard has a special EDL mode
This is kinda like the SoC's pre-bootloader, which loads the bootloader and can be used to flash a new bootloader
EDL mode is locked behind vendor specific certs/keys, so it's unaccessible to the device owner
Sell you a new motherboard?
"could", or "would"?
By two times, my « most self-repairable phone in the world » was bricked. This is so awful.
Well, it's most self repairable, not most durable and resistant. So time to repair 😂
most self-repairable phone in the world
You bricked a Fairphone 3?
A Fairphone 4
This is not reality