One of the latest flagships on the smartphones market is OnePlus 5, coming with 8GB of RAM & Snapdragon 835, it’s just like the previous ones from OnePlus a developer friendly device. This means you can optimize, customize, personalize and power up the Android experience on the OnePlus 5. And obviously, the best way for starting the tweaking process is by learning how to unlock the bootloader. In the lines from this post we will give you a tutorial to learn to unlock the internal Android system that powers your smartphone.
By default, your OnePlus 5 device is coming with a locked bootloader. The bootloader is the system that loads the Android operating systemand other start-up programs, features from the ROM memory into the RAM partition every time you boot or reboot your OnePlus 5. Therefore, it’s locked you cannot modify something. So, if you are an advanced user and you know what you want to obtain, you can decide on removing the factory restrictions with ease in order to unlock the bootloader.
Proceed carefully, because completing this operation is not an official task, applying the steps from this tutorial is not hardbut not approved by OnePlus. Consequently, you will lose the warranty of your device if you choose to follow and apply the steps from below.
Still, the advantages related with the unlock bootloader procedure are more than important. After completing this process your access will be unlimited and you will be able to perform other processes like installing a custom recovery image, gaining root access, removing the bloatware, installing a custom kernel, updating with custom ROMs, adding complex apps from Google Play or from other sources, overclocking or undervolting the CPU frequencies, making Nandroid backups, and more.
Pre-requisites:
- Before resuming the steps from below backup your OnePlus 5. You won’t lose data while unlocking the bootloader but you might while completing further tweaking operations.
- On your computer, install your phone’s USB drivers and add the Android SDK toolkit.
- On your smartphone tap go to Settings ->About Phone and tap 7 times, repeatedly, on Built Number in order to enable the Developer Options.
- Then, enable OEM Unlock from Settings -> Developer Options -> OEM Unlock -> Toggle to Allow bootloader unlocking.
- Charge the phone because if the power left is lower than 50% the Android system can get bricked if your OnePlus 5 gets powered off while you try to unlock its bootloader.
How to Unlock the OnePlus 5 Bootloader
- Power off your device and wait while the shutdown process is completed
- Now, enter your OnePlus 5 in Fastboot Mode by pressing and holding the Volume Up and Power buttons for a few moments.
- While in Fastboot Mode, connect your phone with your computer using the USB cable and allow the drivers to install.
- On your computer go to the Android SDK folder. Here, open a command prompt window (press and hold the Shift keyboard key and right click on any blank space)
- To check if everything is working properly ‘’fastboot devices’’. It returns with the serial number of your device you can continue with the process, if not, ensure the drivers are correctly setup.
- Next, to unlock the bootloader type the command: ‘’fastbootoem unlock’’. The unlock process will begin on your OnePlus 5 device and will come up with a new screen. Choose Yes and it will reboot automatically.
- To check if the bootloader has been unlocked, reboot the smartphone into Fastboot Mode. Open a command window and type: ‘’fastbootoem device-info’’. If the phone is unlocked you will get ‘true’.
This were the steps to successfully unlock the bootloader of your OnePlus 5 device. Now you can start the installation of custom software into your system files through custom recovery and gain root access.
