This will also enable users to install custom ROMs easier

May 4, 2015 01:06 GMT  ·  By

Although Sony has already lost the smartphone war with Samsung and Apple, the Japanese company's Xperia series is quite popular among Android fans.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons that some Android users avoid Xperia smartphones is the fact that they ship with bootloaders that do not allow boot from a recovery partition.

None of the Xperia smartphones available on the market allows that, so developers have to use CyanogenMod, AOKP and OmniROM and work around the limitation imposed by Sony in order to be able to recovery ramdisk together in a single boot image.

While this, in the end, allows Xperia owners to install custom ROMs on their smartphones, it requires some alterations to the Android build system, thus making it more difficult to work on new projects or recover from a bad installation when it happens.

Well, it looks like Sony has finally listened to Xperia users’ cry for help and has decided to release new bootloaders that will enable boot from a recover partition.

According to FXPblog, as part of the Open Devices initiative, the Japanese company made available a range of special bootloaders beginning this week.

With these new bootloaders, Xperia users will be able to use normal recovery images built on any AOSP-based project, without having to modify the build system in any way.

Moreover, the new bootloaders released by Sony will also fix some issues that have been found while porting these devices to a newer 3.10 based kernel.

The new bootloaders are already available for download

It's also worth mentioning that Sony released special bootloaders for the following smartphones: Xperia T2 Ultra, Xperia T3, Xperia M2 and Xperia E3.

They haven't been officially announced, but they are already available for download via Sony Mobile's flash tool.

We expect more Xperia smartphones to receive new bootloaders in the coming weeks, but we are now waiting for Sony to make the existing ones official.