I bought my Fairphone 4 second-hand to put Ubuntu Touch on it, but decided to switch to Calyx after way too many inconveniences with the system.
Later I wanted to flash iodé, but unlike Calyx, it didn’t support relocking the bootloader even though the installer encouraged me to lock it, and I was too rushed to doublecheck, so I ended up with broken system.
I have learned that for security reasons, only Fairphone Repairs can unlock my phone in this situation.
Trouble is, I have no papers for the phone nor any sort of registration or warranty document to show I’m the owner, so I don’t think it’s possible to send the phone over, even though it would be clear to see that it really is a clean install of iodé behind the locked bootloader once they’d get their hands on it.
I wouldn’t mind to come personally if there wouldn’t be any other option (I’m in Belgium) but I didn’t find any direct contact yet (only automatic forms).
I don’t know if it’s even a supported option to simply go somewhere and hand it over.
Any advice on what to do in this situation, or some solution I might have missed?
I looked up iodé regarding the bootloader unlocking, and now I’m confused on why I couldn’t get in.
I had it happen during the time when Calyx had some issue and they temporarily pulled the image for F4 off their site. (I was testing Sailfish and then found out I can’t get the image from their site, because sometimes I get too caught up in experimenting to plan properly)
When I searched for that “event”, it seems it was mentioned on this forum at February the 12 this year, when they said that it will remain unavailable until April, which at least gives gives us a vague idea on when my problem happened.
I left the phone in my drawer after I researched any possible way to reopen the system, but I damaged my current phone few days ago so I thought I’d try again, since I figured it would be cheaper to pay the repair fee than to buy a new phone.
Other options are “Restart bootloader”, “Recovery mode”, and “Power off”.
Selecting Recovery mode returns the phone into the screen in the picture with no changes.
Since it’s been some time, I don’t remember the iodé version I flashed, but I used their installer and went step by step.
I wasn’t able to do anything from the inside nor through adb or fastboot.
At least I learned not to do dangerous things to my phone after midnight and to always use get_unlock_ability. If it’s a lost case, I guess finding another F4 and using this one for spare parts would be a last resort option, because I really love this phone’s concept….
When there is no access to recovery and because the bootloader is locked I agree only FP would be able to help and the chance is high they will not without any proof of purchase…
Figured as much, myself, since allowing anyone to get the bootloader unlocked would defy its purpose, and anyone could just send in a stolen phone, etc.
Thanks for the confirmation, I will count with the fact that I’m not getting it to work again, and reevaluate my options here.
I am new here, should I mark one of the posts as a solution if there’s nothing left to do?
You could for sure try to contact FP support, as my knowledge is rather anecdotal evidence from previous user reports, just be aware support still seem to be super slow in answering.
this for me means unlocking the bootloader is not possible. For sure when you can just unlock the bootloader there would be no issue at all, however I doubt thats the case here.
I have tried the “fastboot flashing unlock” command right after you advised it, since it can’t do any more harm, but the response came saying
FAILED (remote: 'Flashing Unlock is not allowed
Which was why I wrote my message. I apologise for not communicating this fact in my answer.
Looking into the thread, the difference between their situation and mine seems o be that my get_unlock_ability is 0.
(Not checking it was the primary mistake I made, refer to my post No.2 in this thread)
Thank you though, for looking through ways to try and help!
Now I’m just puzzled now by how iodé got broken if it supports relocking,and why my fastboot mode screen doesn’t show the details the people in the /e/ thread have (Bootloader version and baseband version) but that’s just my curiosity about how things function, I suppose.
I might be able to answer that, prepare for a wall of text.
We’ve had a similar case recently, different circumstances, but also an iodé installation where get_unlock_ability was disabled after installation, even though iodé doesn’t set it to 0 on first boot (unlike FPOS, CalyxOS, etc.).
When you flash the Fairphone factory images, the value of get_unlock_ability at the start of the installation process doesn’t matter (the bootloader needs to be unlocked of course), after all the included images have been flashed it’s at 1, as soon as the phone boots into regular Android userland it changes to 0.
I’m not sure the first part happens with iodé, and my theory is that it’s related to iodé not flashing the FRP partition. I remember that we tried flashing that partition separately when people first started bricking their FP4s years ago, but I don’t know anymore.
So if you started your installation with get_unlock_ability already at 0, and my theory is correct, then that’s why you can’t unlock it again.
(The brick itself is caused by rollback protection getting triggered, likely the iodé version you installed had an older security patch level than the system had before, or one of the partitions had an unexpected checksum value)
I’ve written a step-by-step guide to reproduce that problem over on the iodé forum, but I haven’t had the time to actually check it, December is kind of the wrong month to spend a day setting up your main phone again…
Either way, none of this will help you at this point, sorry. As @yvmuell already said, there’s nothing the community can do, only Fairphone has the keys (for good reason).
