Remember the old days when phones were locked to certain carriers and it was difficult to change carriers? In Australia we have been lucky in the past few years where carriers have not locked down their phones but with a new commit to the AOSP that may well change when Android Q drops later this year.
The folks at 9to5 Google have found four commits that were posted to the AOSP Gerrit on the weekend that signal a change in how carriers can lock phones to their networks. The new commits give networks control over which SIM card will work in the phone and which won’t.
The new commit means that carriers will be able to have a list of allowed and excluded carriers for that device. Dual SIM phones will also be affected with carriers able to lock out secondary SIM card slots if the specified SIM is not used in the first slot.
The changes will be in the system partition and thus will survive a factory reset and obviously a reboot. Hopefully many carriers, especially most Australian carriers, are unlikely to use this commit but the option is there.
Do you think this will end up with carriers locking phones to their network? Is this a good thing do you think?
