While the vast majority of Samsung Galaxy device owners don't tinker with the software on their phones, there's a community of Android enthusiasts that love rooting devices, unlocking the bootloader to run custom ROMs and kernels.

That has so far been possible on Samsung devices outside the United States. However, new evidence has surfaced that reveals One UI 8 has taken away the ability to unlock the bootloader on Samsung devices.

This won't make much difference to users in the United States. Samsung took away the option there to unlock the bootloader years ago. It was kept open for users in other parts of the world, but that changes with One UI 8.

A new report highlights evidence found in the Galaxy S25 One UI 8 beta builds that the bootloader unlock option has been removed. A similar change has also been confirmed on the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 which are running stable versions of One UI 8.

A deep dive into the stable version's code has also confirmed that regardless of the region, the bootloader unlock option will not be available on devices running One UI 8. The enthusasit community won't like it.

They won't be able to use custom ROMs to update devices when the official software support runs out or use custom kernels to extract more performance. However, with most Samsung phones now offering seven years of Android OS upgrades, one can argue that the utility of this capability is not as significant as it once was.