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In Sony’s ongoing quest to make their phones more developer friendly, the company has opened up bootloader access for a handful of their current Android smartphones. FXP has found that Sony’s official Mobile Flash tool now offers up an “Open Devices” bootloader option alongside the standard consumer-shipped bootloader.
What will this enable? It’ll allow developers to install custom recoveries right to the devices’ recovery partition. This enables the use of custom ROMs and operating systems without the need to use tricky and clunky bootstrap solutions. In fact, it’s so open that it would be possible to flash recoveries and ROMs for non-Android operating systems such as Ubuntu and Firefox OS (if one has the wherewithal to figure that out, of course).
Sony has only rolled out support for devices with chipsets based on ARM Cortex-A7, so that effectively limits it to the Sony Xperia T3, Sony Xperia M2, Sony Xperia T2 Ultra and the Sony Xperia E3.
That’s not to say more won’t come down the line, though, and we hope to hear something official from Sony soon. In the meantime, you can find the mobile flash tool right here. We wouldn’t recommend using it to do anything immediately, but you’ll likely want it on-hand once the development community takes proper advantage of this new level of access.
good move Sony! bring it to AT&T so I dont have to buy your phones outright and I’ll take a good look at your Z4
nice thing, but sony still limits some capabilities of camera/codecs to non-rooted phones
Nearly manufacturer protects their intellectual property one way or another when you use non-stock firmware; you’re going to lose some functionality. At least it’s not Samsung with stuff like flash counters, etc.
Not different firmware – just unlock the bootloader on some Sony models and they lock out the camera functions claiming… wait for it… DRM concerns.
It is Sony, the same people who brought out Cinavia.
T-Mobile Z3 + Root Access= getting my money’s worth.