HTC Locking Down For Good?

Usually, it’s been easy to root your HTC Android phone and do anything you wanted with it. Thus HTC Andriods have been generally regarded to being “hacker” friendly phones unlike, their Apple iPhone counter parts. However when experienced Andriod development team, AndIRC, reportedly spend their first 72 hours with the new HTC Thunderbolt trying to root it, HTC’s might not be as friendly after all.


Many in the hacker community found difficulties in trying to prepare the Thunderbolt for custom ROMS as it had a variety of obstacles such as signed kernel, signed recovery image and a signed bootloader. As the folks at Androidpolice.com said, “HTC tried to stop us. They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They locked the memory. In short, the ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date.”


While they were successful at rooting the Thunderbolt, more issues are predicted to come along in the future. The same guys from AndIRC report the Incredible S having a signature check much like the one on the ThunderBolt. This means if you try to flash a custom recovery image on your phone, it will try to check the signature and will block access if anything is different than the stock HTC signature. Could this mean the end of a hacker-friendly HTC?