Samsung Upcycle Promise

Slight tangent, but I find it mind boggling that so few phones offer bootloader unlocking - which is essential if you truly want to own your phone.

I was recently in the market for a new phone, and (correct me if I'm wrong) the only companies that offer bootloader unlocking is Google Pixels, Motorola, Nothing, and OnePlus. Samsung and Xiaomi I think both technically support it but it's a pain in the butt practically.

That's... a shockingly small list!? .

In my case, after adding "I want a CPU that isn't crap while being expensive" (eliminating Tensor) and "I don't want to pay full flagship prices for sub flagship performance" (eliminating Nothing), OnePlus and Motorola were pretty much the only two options!

Is it that hard to get a phone you can truly own? I don't know, I honestly hope I'm missing something.

Although I don't agree with the FSF's way of advocating it [1], I do believe that unlocking the bootloader should be a customer's basic right. You don't truly own your device if you cannot control the software you run with it.

[1]: Linus Torvalds argues that the FSF tried to "sneak in" an additional clause to prohibit hardware locking. Since Linux was originally licensed with an "or later version" variant of GPL v2, that would've created a situation where Linus could not merge other people's work into the kernel without relicensing the upstream project to GPL v3. To prevent this, he later explicitly relicensed the kernel as GPLv2-only. https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

> Meanwhile, Samsung's own recycling numbers tell a different story. Its old phone collection campaign, running since 2015, had collected just 38,000 phones as of May 2019. Samsung had sold 2 billion Galaxy devices by February 2019.

Well... duh? Their program offers far less money for the old phone than selling it used on ebay. Why would anyone use it?

Why not keep using them as...phones?

Snark aside, why are the entirely functional devices obsolete? It's because the growing demands of the endless software bloat, web bloat, feature bloat. New wireless technologies and better protocols, sure, but I've been using software for 35 years and the software contribution to this mess really gets me down.

> In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project

How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.

Why are korean tech companies so toxic? Samsung, LG, SK etc all the same. Doesn’t matter if they sell you a phone, a TV, or a refrigator there is something inherently wrong how korean companies are treating the customers.

You can go a long way with just Termux. You can upcycle old phones by installing or building code in Termux to turn the phones into a compute grid, AI inference nodes, file servers, compute servers, web servers.

I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.

I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!

This was not going to come from Samsung, one of the most over-zealous companies out there when it comes from preventing rolling out purely software features from today's phones to yesterday's. E.g. "Now Bar" a literal online feature is blocked on older phones. (Don't get me wrong, it's a useless feature, just shows their thinking)

Or when they announced that "Linux on Dex", for which they had been doing public beta testing on Note 9 phones, would only support the just-released Note 10. (And then they dropped the entire thing anyway).

These are phones for which the only difference between generations may be a couple mAh in the battery. Yet they still use software to gate features.

Am I a fool to think that upcycled devices might not dent the sales of new devices, but would be used in new ways that would actually be positive for the vendor?

My guess, is it boils down to legal liability. Every time I look into repurposing my old smartphones, I inevitably go down the "well, it probably won't burn my house down… but. " It's the same reason why I don't use Molex-to-SATA power adapters, even though I could save a few bucks. Regardless, Samsung ghosting iFixit is inexcusable.

> 76 points by 1970-01-01 2 hours ago

Did we accidentally time travel again?

This is why legislation matters, capitalism cannot sort out such misbehaviors when the public keeps giving money to the same bad actors.

I'm in the market for a new phone. is there a list of phones somewhere that are hackable?

And then they completely removed bootloader unlocking with OneUI 8, in many cases increasing the anti-rollback version so you can't even downgrade.. I can't wait for them to go out of business..

I really dislike how people consider Android a Linux operating system. It's incredibly misleading and serves as more marketing than substance. If it were, then the Samsung Upcycle program would be ready to go.

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