Unlocking the Pixel 9 bootloader breaks some Pixel AI apps – Liliputing

Google’s newest smartphones have better cameras, improved fingerprint sensors, more RAM, and other hardware upgrades when compared to the previous-generation. But some of the key selling points for the new Pixel 9 series smartphones are their new AI capabilities.

Now that the phones have begun shipping though, some users have found that some of those AI features stop working if you unlock your phone’s bootloader.

That new Pixel Screenshots feature, which lets you capture screenshots that are analyzed by Google’s Gemini Nano on-device AI and saved in a searchable index, allowing you to ask Google for information about things you saved days, weeks, or months ago? It doesn’t work at all if you’ve unlocked your bootloader. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve rooted your phone: if the bootloader is unlocked, the app won’t get past a screen that says it’s trying to download models.

In an xda-developers forum thread, users have reported that other affected app include the AI Weather Report, Call  Notes (which creates text summaries of phone calls), and Pixel Studio, a new image generation app.

Some folks have been able to get some of those apps to function on unlocked and rooted device by using the latest Canary version of Magisk, along with several additional modules. But so far Pixel Screenshots only seems to work on devices with locked bootloaders.

It’s possible that users will find more workarounds in the future. But this is the latest in a growing list of examples demonstrating that while Android may have an open source core, many of the apps and features that ship with most Android phones are proprietary, closed-source solutions that may not always interact well with devices that have been bootloader unlocked or rooted. And that’s at least as true of Google Pixel phones as it is of any other.

To be fair, unlocking a phone’s bootloader does make it a little more vulnerable to certain security threats, but it also gives users the freedom to flash custom recovery tools that can be used to backup or restore your device and install software that modifies your device’s behavior in ways that might not normally be supported. Basically, it gives you more control over your device.

In order to get that kind of control though, you increasingly have to give up on access to some of the features available on a unrooted devices with locked bootloaders.

via 9to5Google