Last year, HTC faced a PR nightmare when they started locking bootloaders on their devices. The Android development community joined forces against HTC, voicing their displeasure and ultimately forcing HTC to back down on its new policy. To make sure things were back on track, Peter Chou, HTC CEO got involved in the situation announcing “There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones [and] we’ve listened. I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices.”
In the following months, HTC released its bootloader unlocking tool on htcdev.com, giving users the ability to officially unlock bootloaders on HTC devices. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse last week when Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo tried to use HTC’s tool to unlock the bootlaoder on the AT&T HTC One X. After several failed attempts, Paul contacted HTC and received a quick reply.
[quote]HTC is committed to listening to users and delivering customer satisfaction. Since announcing our commitment to unlockable bootloaders, HTC has worked to enable our customers to unlock the bootloader on more than 45 devices over the past six months. In some cases, however, restrictions prevent certain devices from participating in our bootloader unlocking program. Rest assured, HTC is committed to assisting developers in unlocking bootloaders for HTC devices and we’ll continue to unlock additional devices in the future.[/quote]We are not sure what “restrictions” are preventing HTC from unlocking the bootlaoder on the HTC One X, but we have a suspicion that AT&T carries most of the blame. AT&T has always treated Android as a second-class citizen and even blocked users from manually installing Android applications on their devices.
While HTC’s hands may be tied by AT&T, the development community has the power and recourses necessary to unlock the bootloader on the AT&T HTC One X. How long do you think it will take the development community to unlock the HTC One X?
Source: MoDaCo
Might want to fix that very misleading title. Right now it’s saying AT&T is somehow preventing HTC from locking the One X bootloader, when in fact the opposite is likely true (as you state in the actual article.)
I’m not seeing it. If AT&T is restricting HTC from unlocking the bootloader, that means they are trying to stop HTC.
On a separate note, AT&T sucks. Don’t they understand that their stupid policies leads more people to use software exploits to unlock the bootloader and gain root access to their devices. If people use HTC’s method, at least you know who is unlocking their phones and you can keep track of things a bit better.