[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S 4] Cruiserdude:
The ironic thing is, many people say one of the reasons they lock the bootloaders is due to warranty exchanges from this community. That doesn't make alot of sense to me, since they turn around and say that we're too small a group to affect their sales decisions. But still, it's out there. The theory is you have noobs who can't read going and messing around with things they don't understand. They either make major idiotic mistakes that could easily have been avoided, or they do something simple that's fixed easily enough, like causing a bootloop, but they can't be bothered to take 5 minutes to learn how to fix it. So they take the phone as is, to Verizon and demand a replacement.

The thing is, this may have been the case in the past, when devices were many and this whole process wasn't as well understood, but I don't think that sort of thing happens often now. Each phone has a huge following, because each manufacturer has only one or 2 flagships a year, and they're very similar between carriers. There's a wealth of information and guides, one click fixes, and factory images and documentation on restore methods. Not to mention that most of us have been doing this awhile now.

So sure, occasionally someone will flash the wrong rom or something else and hard brick it, and sending it back is easier than finding someone with a JTAG. And who's to say that certain stability issues a phone may develop over time aren't at least partially due to being overzealous with some kernel options. But the majority of us return after experiencing some sort of legitimate hardware issue, and first Odin the phone back to unrooted stock, wipe our data, and send in a phone that's been in a case and had a screen protector it's whole life. I'd be willing to bet that far more returns come from people who had cosmetic blemishes from dropping it, up to and including small cracks that they hoped they could slip by. Or water damage that didn't happen to catch the stickers, or they bought new stickers. The point is, software tinkering may account for some degree of "fraudulent returns", but I'd imagine the percentage is fairly small these days.

Now let's consider a few more things. As anyone who's had a Motorola knows, a locked bootloader with signature verification that prevents downgrades is far easier to brick and much harder to restore than others are, not to mention restoring properly takes FOREVER. There's a ton of ways to brick it, or get on a leaked build and potentially be stuck there forever, while with an unlocked Samsung you could just fire up Odin and flash whatever you want whenever you want, and 5 minutes later you've at least got a working phone. When I had my RAZR, there were tons of people who would get royally screwed and be unable or unwilling to fix it, and they'd send it in to Verizon and get a new one. At the time, I thought such people were awful and the reason they locked the phones down at all, but the fact is most of them wouldn't have sent their phones in at all if not for the locked bootloader. Such phones are easier to break and harder to fix, especially given all the hoops we have to jump through to get around it. I don't imagine that Verizon is so naive as to think we'll just give up and quit trying to hack our way past a locked bootloader, so they obviously knew such a move would likely increase returns/exchanges, yet calculated that whatever benefit they would see would more than make up for that extra overhead.

I'm not buying the Netflix thing, that makes no sense, as such apps are freely available in the Play Store for all devices, most of which are unlocked. And even the BYOD argument doesn't make sense, as its easy enough to ensure security through encryption and server-side verification. Or simply allow business users to lock their bootloaders, and leave the rest of us alone. And of course they wouldn't go to that much trouble for those of us still with Unlimited that tether more than they would like, it's not like that males up a huge percentage of their customers.

In fact, I see no good reason for their draconian views on bootloaders. I know it sounds foolish to say they're just evil and don't want us to have fun, but it makes as much sense as anything else. The fact is, if you buy a computer, you're given full access over your own system, as well as a recovery image and a clear method of how to use it. If you wish to install a different OS than what you were provided, you're free to do so. The manufacturer is not obligated to support any software issues you may encounter with this, though most will still provide what help they can regarding Linux drivers and such, or restoring your original OS. That is entirely at their option, yet they will definitely still support any hardware issues you may encounter. I don't see why this should be any different, but all the companies act like it's such a sin to flash roms on your phone. What's the difference?

If Verizon doesn't want to support unlocked bootloaders, then fine, don't support them. Sell phones with them locked, allow us to unlock them, and state that we must return to the original software state before they will assist us with issues, which most of us already do anyway. If that's not good enough and they just don't want to deal with unlocked bootloaders at all for some reason, then they have no business selling hardware, and should stop and adjust their plan pricing accordingly.

/

Sent from my VZW Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition :)