Sony gives developers an official path to bootloader access on select phones

In Sony’s ongoing quest to make their phones more developer friendly, the company has opened up bootloader access for a handful of their current Android smartphones. FXP has found that Sony’s official Mobile Flash tool now offers up an “Open Devices” bootloader option alongside the standard consumer-shipped bootloader.

What will this enable? It’ll allow developers to install custom recoveries right to the devices’ recovery partition. This enables the use of custom ROMs and operating systems without the need to use tricky and clunky bootstrap solutions. In fact, it’s so open that it would be possible to flash recoveries and ROMs for non-Android operating systems such as Ubuntu and Firefox OS (if one has the wherewithal to figure that out, of course).

Sony has only rolled out support for devices with chipsets based on ARM Cortex-A7, so that effectively limits it to the Sony Xperia T3, Sony Xperia M2, Sony Xperia T2 Ultra and the Sony Xperia E3.

That’s not to say more won’t come down the line, though, and we hope to hear something official from Sony soon. In the meantime, you can find the mobile flash tool right here. We wouldn’t recommend using it to do anything immediately, but you’ll likely want it on-hand once the development community takes proper advantage of this new level of access.