One aspect of Android phones that some people find really appealing is just how much you can tinker with them and make them yours. If you’ve got a T-Mobile OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren, though, there’s something you need to be aware of if you’ve been thinking about tinkering with it.

It’s been discovered that if you unlock the bootloader on your OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren from T-Mobile, something you can do to root the phone and load custom ROMs onto it, that your phone will no longer be able to accept over the air updates.

The issue is that when you unlock the bootloader, your phone erases the userdata partition that includes a file that’s required for new software updates to be installed on your phone. This file is deleted for security reasons. However, this causes the phone to think it’s been tampered with, and you’ll be given a “Couldn’t update, Installation problem” error when you try to install updates.

What’s more, this file isn’t publicly available for download, nor are the full system images that you could flash to restore your phone to a working state if you ran into this problem on many other Android phones.

This issue also appears to be caused if you perform the “Master reset with hardware keys” described on T-Mobile’s support site, as noted by Android Police, and so that’s another thing for you OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren owners to be aware of.

Neither T-Mobile nor OnePlus has officially commented on this situation, so it’s unclear if and when a solution to this issue will be made available. I’ve reached out to T-Mo for more info on the situation and will update this post if I get a response.

Being unable to install software updates can be a big issue, as we’ve even seen recently with T-Mobile’s OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren. Some owners of the phone were reporting issues with GPS while on 5G, but an update that was released for the phone last week brought with it a fix for the problem. If you unlocked your phone’s bootloader and ran into this update problem, though, you’d be unable to get that fix.

Unlocking the bootloader isn’t something that every Android user does, but this is whole situation with the T-Mobile version of the OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren is still an issue and so hopefully the two companies can address the situation soon.

Via: Android Police
Sources: hanetzer.github.io, OnePlus Forums