The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 is an amazing smartphone that marks a lot of firsts for the company. You get an under-screen front-facing camera in the device's foldable 7.6-inch display, and a rear triple camera setup as well. And if you like having those cameras, you know, actually functioning, then you probably don't want to unlock your bootloader. Samsung is taking an odd measure to prevent people from modding its phones: if you unlock the Z Fold3's bootloader, the camera functionality will be completely crippled.
Users from the XDA-Developers community spotted the change. And it's not a bug of any sort — it's completely on purpose. When you're unlocking your bootloader, your phone will warn you that going ahead with the process will "cause the camera to be disabled and may cause your phone or apps to stop working correctly."
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The Z Fold3's camera functionality noping out of existence after having its bootloader unlocked. Image credits: XDA-Developers
Those are some big words for any new Z Fold3 owner looking to root their phones, and indeed, once the phone is unlocked, the camera will stop functioning correctly. The camera app will fail to open, and apps will fail to even show a viewfinder. Facial recognition won't work either. For the record, re-locking your bootloader brings back full camera functionality.
If you're having deja vu vibes, it's because, yes, Sony used to do something similar too. In the case of Sony phones, it could be a lottery of either having photos taken by your camera look like crap or just having your camera stop working altogether. Luckily, the company stopped doing this after the release of Android 9 Pie.
As for Samsung, well, it's never been the friendliest company towards smartphone modding in general. It's been widely known for years that unlocking your bootloader will blow a Knox e-fuse on your device, permanently disabling Samsung Pay functionality. While the camera thing doesn't seem to be related to that Knox e-fuse, having a phone with a non-working camera, even if you can roll it back, is definitely not cool. It's not clear if future Samsung phones will also take this measure to discourage bootloader unlocking. But it's definitely an uncool move.