They kinda do, they have a recovery partition you can't access without adb.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Because of capitalism & companies that dont want your phone to have a life after use.
That said, some do. Most Motorola devices can have the boot loader unlocked, and all Google Pixel (and nexus) devices can be unlocked.
The next problem is the closed source BLOBS from companies like Qualcomm who make the majority of the ARM cpus in these phones. Even though they are ARM they are not standard enough to run without some propitiatory code that is obscured and encoded into the firmware.
Phones evolved into pocket PCs but they were and still are primarily radios. Radios that YOU personally aren't licensed to operate, the phone manufacturer/carrier is. Open source OSs would allow users to operate those radios, which means they could develop communications using cell carrier bands without a license. Imagine meshtastic at 50x the bitrate and everybody and their grandma already has the hardware. Why would people keep paying $60/mo to have every communication recorded and given to the government?
The current telecommunications system is the most powerful mass surveillance tool to ever exist. That's not something that will be dismantled easily.
I can spend $20 right now and buy a ham radio that I have full control over and no license to operate. This ain't it.
Ham radio requires a license. You may be thinking of other services like gmrs . We get the point though.
...yes.
I can spend $20 and buy a ham radio.
I have full control over it.
I have no license to operate it.
Don't need a license to have the radio or even to use it to listen. Only need a license to transmit.
Their point is they can buy the radio and use it do to things they aren't allowed to, so why aren't those devices subject to the same restrictions as cell phones
Correct, but to be fair they did say "to operate" which should be taken as transmitting.
That also depends on where you are located. Some countries are twitchier about citizens having radio equipment than others.
That's not using it for communications then.
That's a bit of a huge stretch.
People can load custom operating systems on their computer all they want without turning their wifi and Bluetooth adapter into a two way software defined radio.
Every radio band is subject to their own rules.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transmit on frequencies that are "license by rule," where the FCC license to transmit is granted to everyone who follows the Part 15 rules about the technical details. So nobody needs a separate license to use wifi or Bluetooth, and the devices themselves are only subject to certain technical restrictions, like maximum transmit power and the like.
Ham radios transmit on bands that allow for a license for anyone who can pass the test and pay the fee.
Cell phones operate on frequencies and bands that have much stricter licensing rules, and the devices are certified to follow the technical rules under pretty much all circumstances. They go through much more thorough testing than the radios capable of transmitting on amateur bands or license by rule bands.
I understand that. It's just that this entire argument doesn't qualify. The OS has no out of spec influence over the modem due to its design. Its entirely self-contained component with its own firmware and driver stack. The OS is at the mercy of the modem's firmware and that firmware prevents this exact scenario described.
Cellular carriers don't have more bandwidth, usually they have a lot less, they just use it more efficiently and reuse that same bandwdith across many cells. Something like meshtastic is great but without centralised tracking of user equipment you cant handover between cells without dropping traffic. Meshtastic uses much larger bands less efficiently.
"Less efficient" is quite a misnomer here, since the meshtastic network mainly has to work around the regulations, which leaves it only small timeframes for transmitting. When such a project can only transmit for a few minutes per hour, then naturally it has way less bandwidth overall
It "works around legislation" by using a sub gigahertz open band that wasn't designed for mobile comms. Lora was designed for low bandwidth M2M communications which is why it's allocated 13 odd MHz and in a band that's good for long range. That band is about the same size as a typical cellular carrier frequency band but as I said cellular carriers have the infrastructure and equipment to make efficient use of it, dividing it up between cells and reusing across cells. That's the only way to get high bandwidth comms out of sub gigahertz frequencies. Even then carriers also supplement their longer range sub gigahertz with higher frequency bands in denser areas.
Nerds in here screeching about corporations and shit.
It's because people don't give a fuck and a locked down device is more simple to support and usually will provide a better experience.
a locked down device is more simple to support
Not really. Locked down hardware specs are simpler to support, because, well, it's the same hardware everywhere. Hence why standardized computers and phones like Apple's stuff are theoretically easier and simpler to support: there's very little variation.
The main support problem tends to be drivers and that's a vendor-OS problem (nvidia on linux being a classic example). The experience is also entirely reliant on how well the OS behaves once it's fully up and running, the boot sequence being locked or not makes no difference for that experience.
Normal users rarely, if ever, boot into recovery mode. To think that having full access to a well hidden feature that only advanced users are likely to even bother with will affect their experience at all makes no sense.
And better security, theoretically.
TBH most Android users would absolutely install all sorts of malware if it wasn’t literally impossible with the OS’s architecture. Not that Google Play isn’t a scam-infested bog, but I do get the locked-down approach.
IM SAD
Modern PCs can trace their lineage all the way back to the IBM PC Compatibles. Multiple vendors across the industry consolidated on a set of standards (because IBM basically had a monopoly at one point), and consumers came to expect that these standards would be followed.
When smartphones came on the scene, there was no expectation for them to follow desktop standards. It was the Wild West, and every manufacturer ended up doing things at least a little differently—much like the early PC market, actually. The customer base was the general public, not the hobbyists and tinkerers who bought into the early PC market, and there was no regulatory pressure to adopt open standards. In addition, I don’t think people anticipated the extent to which phones would become the dominant form of computing for much of the globe.
Having attempted to install Linux on an ARM device I think the real answer boils down to how ARM works. You could have UEFI or a BIOS but more likely the CPU will scan for data at specific offsets toward the beginning of the disk for a bootable kernel.
Most ARM devices I've fucked about with have uboot or towboot
Isn’t that just the boot loader you’re still writing to some specific part of the disk for the CPU to find?
the SoC will likely look in EMMC, then SD, then SPI for devices, then execute at a specific address when it finds something like how BIOS looks for the 512 bytes at the start of a GPT volume.
My pinebook has towboot on the SPI rom. It boots towboot and towboot knows how to load a kernel over NVME. Then its basically at the kernel already.
Phones have always been locked down, all the way back to when you could only use a phone that AT&T sold you attached to a landline.
Basic cell phones were generally very locked down, or at least there was no documentation on how anything worked. I do remember using a photo and contact syncing tool that had the protocols for a bunch of “feature” phones reverse engineered. IIRC the dev gave up because he kept getting sued because the phone manufacturers and carriers made money off of charging for that.
When smartphones came around, Android was actually very open. My first Droid was completely open, no need to even unlock anything. Applications could be installed and run from anywhere, including the SD card. Custom ROMs were common and easy to install.
But the carriers were not happy, due to the proliferation of malware running on their networks and a general fear of hackers. Plus the “Hey, we want to charge for that like we do on the feature phones!” Back then, the carriers were all powerful because they could and would kick out any device they wanted. Users were also pretty unhappy due to the lack of security and malware. So they started by adding a boot loader lock and eventually locked down more and more.
The iPhone was locked down from the beginning. It was seen as more of an iPod or other accessory device by most people, so no one really cared.
And, that’s basically been it.
Really, the fact that PCs are as open as they are is pretty amazing and mostly due to different companies reverse engineering each other and a lot of court decisions. I’m sure looking back that IBM really wishes that their cases had gone differently.
Android phones don’t have a BIOS for the same reason that Macs don’t have a BIOS and Raspberry Pis don’t have a BIOS — they run on the ARM architecture, not the Intel-compatible PC architecture.
As such, the bootloader system is compliant with a totally different reference system; ARM (Acorn Reference Machine) has been around almost as long as the IBM PC compatible architecture.
As for the “why are phones more locked down” bit, it’s because they’re supposed to be appliances, not general computing platforms. You want your phone to always work, so if you receive a phone call, text or email, it’s likely going to work.
Although the real answer is that if you buy a computer, you own the computer and get to decide what goes on it (well, unless it’s locked down to Windows or macOS). Phones contain bits that are owned by your carrier, bits that are owned by the manufacturer, bits that are owned by the software developer. And each of those groups doesn’t want anyone else messing with their private software.
I personally choose a phone that was easy to unlock and put e/os based on lineage on it. Its degoogled but i am pretty sure that at least the french police can get full access instantly. But at least the phone itself does not spy on me beyond the few unsafe apps i installed because they had no real alternatives
Because phones have the most sensitive data out of all your devices for most people, and they are also the easiest to break, lose, get stolen, or have an unauthorized users access its contents.
Its just to protect the users from themselves and others.
This is at least in large part how the locking down of smartphones began. People either weren't around yet or don't remember how much of a wild west smartphones were for malware, scams, etc. when they first reached mass market uptake. There was a while there where companies were blocking smartphones from their networks because of the security risks.
It took Apple and their closely integrated/walled garden approach and insistence to sway the perception. And that's what other manufacturers then decided to emulate.
Because they're not computers, they're media devices, like Xbox and iPod. They're not meant to be open.