That’s illegal under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act.
Send them a certified letter. Inform them that they need to prove you caused the damage, repair or replace your device, or you’ll be taking them to arbitration.
They generally have to pay for the arbiter, so it’ll be cheaper to just replace your cheap phone even if they win.
I once tried to do a relatively basic repair on a phone, and ended up really breaking it. Like the touch screen won’t work because I broke some shit on the motherboard that now requires micro soldering broke it.
So I send it to a repair company that allegedly does some micro soldering, and they call me to tell me they can’t repair it because their diagnostic utility doesn’t work unless it’s the stock OS (I’ve been a GrapheneOS user for many years). What they do is… wipe my data and then tell me it’s not the screen so they can’t repair it.
Then I sent it to an actually good repair shop and they fixed it very quickly, easily understanding the problem. Good repair companies aren’t easy to find but damn are they worth it. They’re almost always smaller shops and they do not GAF what you do with your phone’s software.
It’s illegal for them to do that, BTW. They have to prove magisk damaged your battery.
I ran into this with Dell when they tried to claim after market RAM was the reason a CPU core wasn’t responding to interrupt requests.
All it took was asking for the diagnostic data showing that the aftermarket RAM caused it to get the warranty repair approved.
You just gotta push back until they cave. Maybe ask for their mailing address for your FTC report or for the number to their legal department (most call centers are terrified of escalating anything to the actual company).
But, don’t directly threaten legal action, because they’ll stop the call right there.
Don’t go to any authorized repair center unless it’s still in warranty. Those people don’t care about you or your things. They are obligated to service you. Any 3rd party repair person has to work triple as hard and give you double the service to win your business.
As someone who used to work at and Apple and Samsung authorized repair center, it’s not that we don’t care. It’s that Apple and Samsung control every single thing we do and will fine us for deviating from their rules.
Here in Brazil the hardware and software are technically two different products, in such a way that you can’t deny a hardware warranty repair due to software modifications. That’s the good part.
The bad part is that manufacturers do that anyway because they know you won’t pay the legal fees to challenge this in court. This strategy mostly pays off. If you’re particularly annoying, or somebody from our customer protection watchdog happens to take interest in your claim, the company will fold and repair the modified device for you eventually.
We gotta get EU on board this train.
Samsung have been trying to dodge honouring under warranty for years - check the comments for how much work had to be put in to get them to honour it. It pays to fight sometimes.
You cannot imagine the lies I had to tell to the people while working for Applecare.
are you the brick wall in this meme?
yes
I fried the battery charging chip for my HTC dream when I rooted and used it as a router for the family in holiday. I felt it was hot to the touch but I thought “it’s gonna be ok, surely it has temperature sensors and it will throttle”. High draw for a long time when charging = the chip exploded and it wouldn’t charge anymore. Luckily the battery was removable and I already got an external charger for it from dealextreme. But HTC still repaired it for free under warranty even if it was my fault and I gave to them back rooted.
Same for LG when my rooted Nexus 5X boot looped, although that was an endemic problem caused by LG shitty manufacturing (they changed the stance a few months after that, never bought LG anymore)
Samsung should repair it, I thought they were the only ones root friendly left on the market…
I thought they were the only ones root friendly left on the market…
Not anymore.
Yes, they used to be.
Samsung isn’t root friendly at all. Most of their phones can’t be bootloader unlocked officially.
The only ones that do are google, moto and the chinese ones
wdym literally all phones can be unlocked without a waiting period, account, internet connection or any other bs (it trips the knox e-fuse tho)
you just go to the settings, enable oem unlock and run fastboot unlock.
it’s as straight forward as it gets and works on all devices that aren’t locked to a carrier or sth (which is mostly an us-exclusive issue)
i was using my older mi play as a router (temporary solution) until we moved and got a proper internet connection. (we were very close to the poland-ukraine border back then and only my old phone was able to pick up vodafone ua’s 4g signal across the border)
it shut itself down multiple times and was constantly turning off the tethering mode due to overheating.it still has vibrant permanent yellow burn marks on the display around the hot spots and only drains 0.5a while charging no matter what.
you can absolutely do it yourself. be prepared and get the right tools, look up many many guides and videos before you start, but I honestly think it’s doable for someone whose never opened a phone. those batteries are an absolute pain in the ass to remove, but as long as it’s discharged below 20% you really don’t have to worry about it it catching fire or anything catastrophic like you’re lead to believe (just be careful ofc and wear PPE)
Would, but I don’t have the equipment.
where I live there are shops for laptop, console and phone repairs. I’d keep it simple and go to one of those
I replaced the battery in my old Pixel 3a by myself without the tools with iFixit. They shipped me the battery and tools I’d need for like $50 and all I had to do was follow the guide.
If it’s still under warranty, they HAVE to unless they can prove your modification caused the system to fail. It’s no different than the silly stickers that say “warranty void if removed” - that’s a nice fantasy for the manufacturer, but at least in the US it’s been ruled those stickers mean absolutely nothing. If they’re refusing to fix a phone under warranty, contact your local AG and enjoy watching them squirm. Loop in the FTC for good measure.
An ideal phone:
- Fairphone 4/5 like build
- Unlocking the bootloader without asking manufacturer for the code
- Access to the flashing and pairing tools from the factory to eliminate bricking
- U-boot, Coreboot or similar sane bootloader
- (Close to) mainline Linux support for the components, to enable “lifetime” updates and OS freedom
- Optional: headphone jack and SD card slot
I use SD card and headphone jack daily constantly
Not optional in my case
What a dream… But sadly it probably won’t happen. They manages to establish this shit as a standard and that’s it.
Imagine PCs would be like that too. Would anyone buy them if they couldn’t install EVERYTHING? Or delete or change system-stuff/-apps? Or just go and install Linux? Or win? Or both?
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If it’s under warranty, they almost certainly cannot deny the claim for this or really many bullshit reasons manufacturers say like removing a “warranty void” sticker - which is still covered. You can sue in small claims. Check out the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act should you need to prove your point.
Fuck Samsung. Not surprised though
Unroot, lock bootloater and bring it again, lol
Battery died and it doesn’t power on.
Then how the fuck do they know magisk is running on the phone?
They replaced the battery, saw then sent back the broken one?
So someone got payed to wait for the phone to be shipped to them, took the effort to carefully and meticulously disassemble the phone, install the new battery by micro soldering the battery leads to the mainboard, then booted it to see it blew a shitty security fuse but can still boot fine, then took the time and effort to uninstall by removing the micro solder from the battery and mainboard without damaging the phone, just to tell them they can’t do it?
I wouldn’t be at ALL surprised
Exposition time!
So I took it to the repair while the battery was about to die. Somehow, the battery just started working again (it kinda phased in and out of broken and not broken before dying at the time of posting) so they saw Magisk was installed. Fast Forward to the day I made the post. The phone finally died completely and wouldn’t charge no matter what, but I hadn’t uninstalled Magisk. Meaning I can’t unless its repaired. And if they repair it right now, I won’t have a chance to uninstall Magisk and will be forced to pay for it.
Samsung puts fuses in their that blow when you install a different os
