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This is a very complex topic that is very hard to draw the line on.
As a technical person who follows hacking and security news i can understand google introduced the api and warnings, as phones are getting hacked and unlocked bootloader or root can be abused to keep your malware going, and has been abused in the past.
But as a user of fairphone/lineageOS, who tells google, apple, meta, ... all of them to fuck off when i can, this scares me. The lockdown of devices can and is going too far. Hell, i even consider samsung's android ui changes to be going too far, as it changes a shit ton of stuff and really is not a stock android experience. It locks users in their environment..
I find it funny that Google and some banks are so worried about security on Android that I have to have up to date system, app and can't be custom ROM, can't be rooted and whatnot. And then they'll allow you to login to their bank from Internet Explorer on XP or some shit.
This. This, this, this, this!
My linux computers are rooted. I can get root any time i need it and nobody is refusing to offer their sevices on linux because it is vulnerable.
Nobody ever points out that when any app wants root, you get a dialog to ask if it can have it. If you don't know why it's asking, say no. It ain't rocket science.
Now, if you are going through customs and you don't want them to copy your phone and read all your personal documents, that is a different situation. Lock your bootloader unrooted and encryped to the nines. Preferably use a phone with almost nothing on it.
That's not quite true, though in that case it's about the service provider being unable to verify that the user isn't running a operating system configured or modified to work against the interests of the service provider.
Stock android experience is the exception, not the norm, sadly. Some manufactures like Motorola or HMD have a light touch and close to stock but other ones don't. The worst offenders are Chinese brands who twist it so much and without much benefit(Atleast, Samsung's ONE UI is customizable as heck, can't say the same for Realme's).
Can you cite examples of rooted smartphones leading to significant data breaches or financial losses? When the topic comes up, I always see hypotheticals, never examples of it actually happening.
It seems to me a good middle ground would be to make it reasonably easy (i.e. a magic button combination at boot followed by dire warnings and maybe manually typing in a couple dozen characters from a key signature) for users to add keys so that they can have a verified OS of their choice. Of course, there's very little profit motive to do such a thing.
Pre-locked bootloader times ive had multiple android devices be passed to me that were malware infected that changed the rom in a way that even a factory reset would not remove the malware. Locked bootloaders made it so the rom needed to be signed and unaltered on boot, fixing this. Root access also means apps can use and access api's in android that it normally cant, changing settings and things inside android it shouldnt. What do you think happens when malware comes in? :p
Imo, i agree what you said. bootloaders should remain locked but you should be able to somehow, in the bootloader, be able to add the os' signature/keys to the bootloader's trusted stuff like how secure boot on a pc keeps os signing keys and verification stuff inside the tpm.
This way you can install lineage os for example, tell bootloader to trust it, and lock bootloader again so nothing can be changed anymore.
I wouldnt take this from user input, as that is controlable by malware, but rather come from the OS itself. Maybe even during installation, idk