In brief: People who are planning on buying a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 to play with custom software on information technology will have to make a bigger tradeoff than ever earlier, with the simple action of unlocking the bootloader beingness enough to disable all camera functionality until the process is reversed.

One of the reasons why telephone enthusiasts choose to buy Android phones is that they typically get more than liberty to fiddle with the software that's running on them. However, a number of early adopters of Samsung'southward Galaxy Z Fold3 found that unlocking the bootloader comes with some serious penalties on top of the usual risks associated with the action.

It's no secret that Samsung is non a big fan of people rooting and modding their devices, but until now the biggest consequence of doing so was that your phone would permanently lose the protection afforded by the company'southward Knox security solution. In turn, features like Samsung Pay and Secure Folder would exist rendered unusable, but the one-time in detail may be an acceptable tradeoff for some.

Image credit: ianmacd | XDA Developers

However, two senior members of the XDA Forums establish that when they tried to unlock the bootloader on their Galaxy Z Fold3s, they received a message warning that all five cameras would be disabled as a result. On closer inspection, the two enthusiasts plant that all camera features such as facial recognition are indeed disabled, and third-political party photographic camera apps no longer work later on unlocking the bootloader.

Every bit of writing, there'south no workaround for this, simply re-locking the bootloader does reenable the cameras. Either way, it looks like Samsung really, really wishes that yous non change anything nigh how its devices work, which some may find is a similar behavior to that of a certain fruity company we won't name.