Nokia re-emerged from the death earlier this year with the launch of Nokia 6 – this time with the Android operating system. With Android-powered smartphones, the company has finally accepted the fact that Android – an open source operating system is the only way to future. Combining the fans’ excitement and nostalgia associated with the Nokia brand, HMD Global now aims to capture a decent market share and (hopefully) not repeat its past mistakes.
The company has so far launched four of its Android-powered smartphones – Nokia 3, Nokia 5, Nokia 6, and the flagship Nokia 8. All of these smartphones run the stock UI with Android Nougat and are also promised to get the Android Oreo update soon. The sole reason for offering the Pure Android experience with Stock UI is to provide the timely updates. And, so far, the company has done so well. It has set a good record in sending out monthly updates to its complete lineup, sometimes even outrunning Google while providing security patches.
All good, right? Well, it isn’t. HMD Global’s chief product officer Juho Sarvikas has just disappointed a share of users with a single tweet. On asking when will users get the bootloader unlocker tools for Nokia smartphones, Juho confirmed that they won’t be getting one in near future. Citing the security reasons, he said they won’t let the users unlock the bootloader.
Sorry, we wont unlock it due to security however we will share our kernel modifications back to the open source community, wip
— Juho Sarvikas (@sarvikas) September 20, 2017
This came as a shock to users who wanted to try custom ROMs on their Android-powered Nokia smartphones. With this disheartening announcement, the company not only disappointed users, but it also ties users to Nokia’s UI which is arguably against the ideology of an open source system. At least, we didn’t expect this from Nokia which came in all new attire with a promise not to repeat its past mistakes.
It’s the year 2017 and asking to let unlock the bootloaders is the least users can expect from Android OEMs. Well, that’s what we think. What about you? Tell us in the comments.