alt Hacker News> As a rule, almost all carrier locked devices do not allow the bootloader to be unlocked. This usually makes sense, as it would allow you to completely bypass the contract.
I don't understand how this works, why/how are a carrier lock and a device lock related? Shouldn't one be a lock on the baseband chip and the other on the main firmware?
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I wonder if it might be about things like tethering, I remember for a while US carriers (AT&T I think?) used to lock it under a specific plan, but unlocking the bootloader/rooting let you bypass this limit
The carrier gives you a subsidized price on the phone and then you pay for it as part of the service bill. If you can unlock it you could switch to a cheaper carrier. None of this should be allowed of course. Phones should always be unlockable.
If you can unlock the bootloader you can generally also reflash the firmware at will on the baseband, so you can replace it or modify it to remove any subsidy/carrier locking on the baseband side.
Unlocking the bootloader will also of course let you eliminate the carrier’s bloatware that they get paid to install and load onto it, including the things that they shoved all the way into the Android “non-disableable” list.
Tracfone called this “cellphone trafficking” all the way since the 90s when people would buy their loss leaders, flash ‘em, and flip ‘em to third world markets for top dollar.
On a lot of prepaid devices such as those from Kyocera for companies like Boost, the limitations are almost all in software configuration, because that's cheap and easy to do rather than rolling your own baseband configuration.
For years, carrier lock on iOS devices was simply a software switch. In a lot of devices, still, if you have an unlocked boot loader you can run patched baseband firmware that doesn't care that it hasn't been told the magic numbers to unlock itself.