Keeping track of companies that "care about your data 🥺"
www.zenfyr.dev
1# HTC
2
3- Verdict: **⛔ Avoid!**
4- Verdict: **🍅 Terrible!** (Unisoc/Spreadtrum)
5
6In the past, HTC allowed you to unlock your bootloader on their [developer website], but in June 2018 for whatever reason, HTC announced that any new phones would not have unlockable bootloaders, however their developer website would remain up for older devices. Unisoc and Spreadtrum devices will never be unlockable, this is *not* HTC's fault, Unisoc/Spradtrum does not allow unlocking.
7> [!NOTE]
8> As of September 2024, the website is still up and working (tested with an HTC Raider), however since HTC hasn't supported it in over 6 years, it may go down at any time, and even for these legacy devices, BS applies.
9
10## S-ON/S-OFF
11
12HTC had a system known as "S-ON/S-OFF", with S-ON enabled, [the only partitions that can be flashed are system and recovery][s-system], all other partitions are read only.
13
14While HTC claims you can write boot with S-ON, it's complicated. For whatever reason, HTC made it so you can't flash boot.img from recovery, if you want to flash boot.img, you have to flash it in fastboot, meaning if you want to flash a ROM, you have to install it in recovery, then reboot to fastboot and flash boot.img, then you can boot.
15
16There have been systems to work around this, such as TWRP's [HTC Dumlock]. There are ways to achieve S-OFF, but it's different for each device. Search for your specific device on [XDA](https://xdaforums.com). Do note that due to the age of most of these tools, they may require legacy operating systems such as **Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows 7**.
17
18***
19Authored by [Ivy / Lost-Entrepreneur439](https://github.com/Lost-Entrepreneur439).<br/>
20
21[developer website]:https://www.htcdev.com/bootloader
22[s-system]:https://www.htcdev.com/bootloader/about_unlock_process
23[HTC Dumlock]:https://xdaforums.com/t/htc-dumlock-flash-boot-from-recovery-without-fastboot-updated-2012-02-28-v2.1509743/