[DoneWithAllThat]

The article casually refers to Asus breaking “their promise” but nothing in the rest of the article suggests Asus ever promised anything of the sort. That they used to provide the tools wasn’t a promise. Did they ever advertise or up-front communicate that these tools would be made available and maintained?

[Knork-and-Fife]

A lot of the zenphone series had bootloader unlock as a listed feature which was then removed when they disabled and took down the tool. The Zenfone 10 was advertised as going to have the feature as well before and even after the launch for a bit. Asus claimed that the tool was coming at several points but the date in their promises kept getting pushed back and eventually turned into we don't know and now it appears to be never. This is stuff that was in writing from them, search it up, but you'll need to check the Internet archive for the info that they've removed from their own sites (like the repeated pushing and cancelling of the return of the unlock tool)

[luuurker]

Asus even used to send free phones to developers over at XDA Developers so they could create custom ROMs and stuff like that, so that excuse doesn't work for them.

[dangus]

It doesn’t matter because my guess is Asus couldn’t be bothered to show up to small claims court over $900.

[tvshtr]

There was system part in developer settings which they removed AFTER you bought the phone. Thus clearly removing functionality that was supposed to be there.