Thinking about buying the fairphone 4. Coming from oneplus 8, which is almost unbrickable, thanks to an EDL MSM tool.

Obviously, I’d be careful. But am I likely to brick a fp4 by ROM hopping? Is it dangerous enough that I should not go into buying this phone with the intention of installing a ROM?

Mainly, I want to play with Ubuntu Touch, PostmarketOS, and maybe sailfish. But I figure if those don’t quite work out, I’ll land on Lineage with MicroG or /e/, since that’ll be stock fp4 in the US.

  • ijeff@lemdro.idM
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    1 year ago

    Leaving this one up since there are already responses below, but just a friendly reminder about rule 2 in the sidebar. We ask that posts like these be made on !askandroid@lemdro.id instead. Thanks!

      • ijeff@lemdro.idM
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        1 year ago

        I’m waiting patiently for that and other moderating tools. I’ve also been having to manually send a message to people whenever their posts are removed. 😭

        • Gamey@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oof, Mastodon is proof that the Fediverse can come up with good moderation tools but it kind of took Gab to do so, let’s hope it won’t be that way with Lemmy!

  • CringyMikami@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Just be careful if you test several android roms, the phone uses anti rollback (ARB), like pixel phones. In certain circumstances it’s possible to brick the phone, and you’ll have to send it to fairphone.

    With android roms that allow relocking the fairphone bootloader (Calyx and Divest for instance), really check if the bootloader can be relocked via fastboot command-line, it will brick if it’s not the case.

    I spent some time reading before attempting anything on it and it went rather smoothly, I don’t hop a lot between roms though.

  • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    You’ll be fine if you read the manual properly before flashing. I’ve done some very sketchy shit to my Oneplus 8 because I knew I could save it with EDL if I screwed up, but that never ended up happening.

    • butterOP
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      1 year ago

      I used EDL all the time. Basically in between any ROM I tried, I used EDL

        • butterOP
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          1 year ago

          No idea. I think it’s considered an exploit as a proprietary Qualcomm feature. It’s just lucky we have it here.

  • branchial@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    There’s a huge warning especially for FP4 on the divestos installation page. Locking the bootloader was problematic on occasion so make sure to check whether it’s lockable before you lock it.

    The phone’s stock operating system is signed with the public test keys from google though, so any security measure regarding that should be relatively easy to circumvent if you know how to sign your own OS.

    • butterOP
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      1 year ago

      I do not. I’ll probably avoid locking anything but stock or LOS. Pretty sure those are fine

  • Anti Weeb Penguin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think you can brick the FP4 that easily, just be careful with TWRP backups, they don’t work well with dynamic partitions.

    • butterOP
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      1 year ago

      I don’t believe in OS backups. I tend to back up the few important files, and just rebuild everything on the other side.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        While I agree that a clean install should be the goal, an OS Backup allows you to go back if you screw up or forgot to backup a specific file.