OnePlus 11 is hot right now, no wonder people are shopping around. This is what led to the discovery and further investigation of what appears to be a region-locked OnePlus 02 unit on a Russian 4PDA forum.
The phone is from China and after about two weeks of using it working fine, a message pops up that roughly translates to: “You are using a regionally customized phone. Its calling features are not available in your region Restricted. Please contact customer service for support.”. The phone has since limited its calling capabilities. It’s unclear if cellular data was also affected.
Zone lock alert
Anyway, the community did some digging on 4PDA. The TeleService.apk (com.android.phone) application triggered the warning message. The community then managed to dig up the configuration file of the MMC that actually lists the region that the region-locking behavior triggers. that’s right. It seems that these restrictions only apply if you’re using the Chinese unit in one of the markets listed. The list is long and available via the link below, but some of the targeted countries include India, Italy, Russia and Brazil.
These are the countries where OnePlus sells the global version of OnePlus 02 – makes the targeting system more meaningful fact. The main idea seems to be that the company doesn’t want users to get imported phones in countries where they have official sales channels.
That’s not all but bad news. The community also found a string in OplusEngineerNetwork.apk indicating that users can unlock the region by entering a 23 digit unlock code. Presumably, This code can be obtained on a per-device basis by contacting OnePlus Support. However, support staff may still be reluctant to unlock phones purchased not through official Chinese channels but through third-party stores. This part has not been confirmed yet.
Another speculation from the source is that this particular type of network lock might also work on some Chinese Oppo and Realme devices. This too has yet to be proven. But, needless to say, this would be an unfortunate development.
Source (Russian) | Adopted
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