Smartphone makers bow to demands for more openness

For many Android enthusiasts, "openness" is almost an 11th commandment. So when manufacturers began restricting full access to Android smartphones a couple years ago, many saw it as a cardinal sin. Good news for you smartphone modders: some manufacturers are beginning to see the light.

"Today, I'm confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices," wrote HTC CEO Peter Chou in a Facebook post. "There has been overwhelmingly [sic] customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones." Essentially, the bootloader is like the backstage area where preparation for a show goes down. When you first turn on a phone, the bootloader is the program that loads the operating system software into a phone's memory and then launches the OS. If your bootloader is unlocked, you can gain "root access" to your phone, which allows for full administrative privileges. That means more control over what's on your device. For many Android phone owners, "openness" is a major draw to the platform. Google's open-source operating system software is published publicly for all to peruse. The Android Market doesn't require a vetting process for app submissions like Apple's App Store does. And being able to modify an Android device via unlocking the bootloader has been very attractive to phone geeks. HTC has long been seen as a relatively modder-friendly phone manufacturer. Although many of their phones have had locked bootloaders, workarounds were easy enough for software developers to spot in order to gain superuser access to their phones. That changed recently, however, when modders discovered that two new Android phones -- the HTC Sensation and Evo 3D -- would come with software that prohibited bypassing locked bootloaders.