Last Updated on September 15, 2022 by Mathew Diekhake
I have received many questions up until now regarding OEM Unlock. I have answered the most commonly asked questions recently such as what is Fastboot OEM Unlock?, how to get OEM Unlock in Developer Options, no OEM Unlock in Developer Options on Samsung, and what does OEM Unlock Mean? Each of them a slightly different question that required a unique answer.
A similar question is how can you unlock the bootloader without OEM unlock. Presumably what they mean when they ask this is whether it is possible to unlock the bootloader on their Android smartphone without enabling OEM Unlocking from the Settings. And the reason they ask this is that they haven’t found a way to enable the Developer Options menu where they would proceed to toggle on the OEM Unlocking option.
Unfortunately, there is no way to unlock the bootloader without having enabled the Developer Options and OEM Unlock. However, we did write about the only solution to a similar problem in one of the articles before, which is this one: how to enable OEM Unlock without Developer Options on Samsung. In brief, the workaround is to flash an OTA file via Recovery Mode. The link details a full tutorial on how to do that. OTA files are available for many branded devices from various manufactuers, as is the ability to get into Recovery Mode. So you should be able to follow a similar idea in that tutorial even if your device isn’t Samsung branded.
Flashing OTA files are almost certainly the answer that a manufacturer’s technician would provide. This is because a manufacturer never unlocks its own bootloader in order to solve a problem. It suggests that all problems can be solved with a locked bootloader. If that wasn’t the case, your manufacturer would send you a device with an unlocked bootloader after they have solved a problem for you, and that never happens.
We do our best to answer your questions with our expertise. However, we also welcome your comments if you have a different solution or idea. If you know how to flash firmware without having installed a custom recovery image and performed a factory reset, please let us know in the comments below. We appreciate your contributions.