Motorola has answered all of the questions about the strongly secured bootloader on the Droid X and the soon to be Droid 2. Lori Fraleigh from Motorola stated “Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years. This practice is driven by a number of different business factors. When we do deviate from our normal practice, such as we did with the DROID, there is a specific business reason for doing so. We understand this can result in some confusion, and apologize for any frustration.”
She also went on to say “We understand there is a community of developers interested in going beyond Android application development and experimenting with Android system development and re-flashing phones. For these developers, we highly recommend obtaining either a Google ADP1 developer phone or a Nexus One, both of which are intended for these purposes.”
Well there you heard it from the source, Motorola is going to make it as hard as they can to stop custom ROM’s from being installed on their phones. They even go as far as tell you to buy your devices elsewhere if you want to develop on them. I have no doubt in the capabilities of the vast community developers. One day there will be an exploit that can be used but this discourages me from these phones for now.
If you pay hundreds of dollars for your phone you should be able to customize it any and every way possible. After the extensive customizations I have made to my Droid, I am seriously rethinking my decision of upgrading to the Droid X just for this reason.
We will have to wait to see what happens but the outlook is gloomy especially with the Milestone proving to be so difficult to crack.
[via motorola]
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