While attempting to install Ubuntu Touch my Fairphone 5 was not responding to the bootloader being unlocked so I thought that locking it and then unlocking it would resolve the issue.
Upon reboot the phone said that the bootloader was not trusted and proceeded to become stuck in fastboot with no access to recovery.
I attempted to use… fastboot flashing unlock fastboot flashing unlock_critical fastboot oem unlock
to no avail.
Currently I have reached out to Fairphone Support and am hoping to hear back to if they can help me with this issue.
Hope that people will some how avoid this in the future.
Hope that people will some how avoid this in the future.
Fairphone really needs to communicate this more clearly. The only mention I found was a pretty vague statement about not being able to boot the device, which doesn’t convey the serious risk of the device becoming completely unusable.
This bootloader really has a serious problem, It just can’t be legal.
We should write another one as a community so that nobody ever ends up in this mess again.
Pretty sure it will be 0 since there’s a mention of being « stuck in fastboot with no access to recovery » and usual commands don’t work as stated above
The FP5 bootloader def has no serious problems and when you play around with flashing one has to inform themselves properly upfront. Ubuntu does not allow locking the bootloader and for this case here its not Fairphones fault or anything Fairphone has to document somewhere.
You could have expanded a bit there but I’ll grant you that I may be oversimplifying things a little for the people reading us here. Basically, if the ROM is corrupted and recovery is impossible, it’s at the very least poor design because there’s no fallback recovery for the end user (at least none that can be used by oneself without shipping the phone to some authorized third-party).
No because of several reasons like Ubuntu, Anti Rollback…
Anti-rollback can coexist with a failsafe unlock mechanism. The real issue is poor design or vendor control, it’s definitely not a technical limitation.
You have been guided to the very detailed forum guide by @koumilak and no I’m not here to summarize this for you. Otherwise this is off topic here. Trying to lock after flashing Ubuntu resulting in a brick is not because of Fairphone missing documentation or the bootloader having a serious problem. Thats caused by Ubuntu and maybe anti-rollback protection implemented by Google into Android. And no a company must not provide tools like firehose to circumcent security measures.
The more I read Fairphone documentation and forum, the more I think one can skip waiting for support to reply in this situation and contact Cordon Electronics directly because apparently it’s not covered by warranty in case one cannot get back to stock OS. I assume they are provided with the firehose loader to run the QDL command and restore FPOS or whatever OS you had before installing Ubuntu.
I also went the live chat way by trying many times to bribe it into making me talk to a human but it didn’t work yet. Good luck
@koumilakfastboot flashing get_flashing_ability looks like a typo in the guide
I reached out to the Cordon Group via the communications contact email form and received an email back from SBE Ltd saying that they “do not support this manufacturer” and I responded with a link to this page here…
You normally cannot bypass Fairphone and directly contact Cordon
That would be really bad for them, because, in addition to allowing phones to be bricked, customers would have to wait for customer service to respond, which takes forever.
I’m not a stuntman, but that sounds like a big legal stunt.
Whyever you repeatedly throw the word legal in. To flamebait?
Do you know the contracts with cordon? How should that work? I contact cordon and than they handle the correspondence with FP for me, Cordon decides what is warranty and what not? We have already seen whats happening when they decide: they dont flash anew they exchange the motherboard for hundrets of euros.
So however you find that, its the way it works: the contact especially for warranty claims has to go through Fairphone.
You think they break laws? Search a lawyer and go the legal route.
Fairphone owners have Fairphones, no Cordon phones and no service contracts with Cordon directly. There’s just no legal base for Cordon as an outsourcing partner of Fairphone (“our Service Center” as per FAQ) to do anything for users without Fairphone’s involvement.
Sure, Cordon on their own would be free to offer direct service to Fairphone owners for money, but they choose not to, and that’s their right as a business.
You can stop bothering Cordon. This runs through Fairphone.
It’s very sad (and quite frankly not acceptable) that support takes so long currently, but this doesn’t change the fact that Fairphone have to tell “their Service Center” what to do.
