Security on our smartphones has been a very important topic in the past year or so. With the emergence of the Stage Fright issue and the emergence of mobile payments, security has been a top priority of smartphone manufacturers. The unfortunate part is that the developmental side of Android might be taking a hit because of it. Recently it was found that the Galaxy S7/S7 edge Snapdragon 820 variant has the bootloader locked, with no way at the moment to unlock it. It was feared the T-Mobile LG G5 variant might have the same issue.

When I received my LG G5 from T-Mobile yesterday, one of the first things I tried was to boot into the bootloader and see if it was truly locked. To my surprise, there were instructions on how to unlock it. I wasn’t feeling very dangerous with my brand-new LG G5, but a user on Reddit, who goes by spanky34 was. He was daring enough to run the commands, and to our surprise it worked.

Not only was spanky34 able to unlock the bootloader on his brand-new T-Mobile LG G5, he was able to boot up into Android, then re-lock it. Nothing bad happened at all. So whether this was T-Mobile’s response to the backlash of the S7/S7 edge or it was already going to happen, it is great news for the developmental community.

So now that the LG G5 bootloader is unlockable for at least the T-Mobile variant, will that influence your purchase? I know it has renewed my faith in LG and I am looking forward to some AOSP ROMs to play around with.