Smartphone makers bow to demands for more openness...

For many Android enthusiasts, “openness” is almost an 11th commandment. So when manufacturers began restricting full access to Android smartphones a couple years ago, many saw it as a cardinal sin.

Good news for you smartphone modders: Some manufacturers are beginning to see the light.

“Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices,” wrote HTC CEO Peter Chou in a Facebook post on Thursday evening. “There has been overwhelmingly [sic] customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones.”

Essentially, the bootloader is like the backstage area where preparation for a show goes down. When you first turn on a phone, the bootloader is the program that loads the operating system software into a phone’s memory and then launches the OS. If your bootloader is unlocked, you can gain “root access” to your phone, which allows for full administrative privileges. That means more control over what’s on your device. More...

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