Keeping track of companies that "care about your data 🥺"

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Why?

Over the past few years, a suspicious number of companies have started to "take care of your data", aka block/strictly limit your ability to unlock the bootloader on your own devices.

While this may not affect you directly, it sets a bad precedent. You never know what will get the axe next: Shizuku? ADB? Sideloading? I thought it might be a good idea to keep track of bad companies and workarounds.

If you know of specific details/unlocking methods, please PR them or drop them in the discussions

The list:

Caution

Reminder that no matter how nice a company is,
you should not trust them unless their unlock process is 100% offline!

⛔ Avoid at all costs!

Huawei/Honor

HMD Global/Nokia

Vivo/IQOO

OPPO/Realme

Xiaomi/Redmi/POCO

Samsung

ZTE

LG

HTC

Meizu

Asus

Alcatel

Apple

⚠️ Proceed with caution!

Motorola/Lenovo

OnePlus

Fairphone

Sony

Microsoft

ℹ️ "Safe for now" :trollface:

Google

Nothing

Umidigi

Misc info

Custom AVB Keys

Custom Android Verified Boot keys is a feature which allows you to run a custom OS with a locked bootloader.

It's rare to see a device which supports custom AVB keys, but some devices can be found here.

Universal SOC-based methods

Kirin

Kirin 620, 650, 655, 658, 659, 925, 935, 950, 960:
It's possible to unlock using testpoints and PotatoNV (Read the readme)

MediaTek

If you own a MediaTek device exploitable by mtkclient you can unlock the bootloader using that.
If it also happens to be an OPPO/Realme device and you need to access fastboot: lkpatcher (web version)

Unisoc

If you own a phone with the Unisoc ud710 or ums512 SOCs you can look into this exploit: CVE-2022-38694_unlock_bootloader

Otherwise, you can also look into this: Spectrum_UnlockBL_Tool
This: xdaforums.com
Or this: subut

Qualcomm

There's no Universal Qualcomm method, unfortunately.

Although some of these might work for you:

The general exploit:
alephsecurity.com the bootloader unlock section.

Xiaomi Mi A1 and maybe all MSM89** manufactured before 2018:
EDLUnlock

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