While the vast majority of Samsung Galaxy device owners don’t tinker with the software on their phones, there’s a community of Android enthusiasts that love rooting devices, unlocking the bootloader to run custom ROMs and kernels.
That has so far been possible on Samsung devices outside the United States. However, new evidence has surfaced that reveals One UI 8 has taken away the ability to unlock the bootloader on Samsung devices.
Samsung clamps down on software tinkering
This won’t make much difference to users in the United States. Samsung took away the option there to unlock the bootloader years ago. It was kept open for users in other parts of the world, but that changes with One UI 8.
A new report highlights evidence found in the Galaxy S25 One UI 8 beta builds that the bootloader unlock option has been removed. A similar change has also been confirmed on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 which are running stable versions of One UI 8.
A deep dive into the stable version’s code has also confirmed that regardless of the region, the bootloader unlock option will not be available on devices running One UI 8. The enthusasit community won’t like it.
They won’t be able to use custom ROMs to update devices when the official software support runs out or use custom kernels to extract more performance.
Source: Say goodbye to your custom ROMs as One UI 8 kills bootloader unlock – SamMobile – SamMobile
I still have a Samsung tab S 8.4 (SM-T700) tablet from 2014 with a screen resolution of 2560 x 1600 (which you can hardly find) and is superlight and only has the required version of Android to run what I need it to because Lineage OS (a custom ROM) upgrades the Android version and Samsung won’t. With this change that won’t be possible in future.
Robin Edgar
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