This post is a bit of a double whammy. On one side it’s my experience with the Samsung A26, and on the other it’s a commentary about Samsung and their “Knox”.
The Samsung A26 is a device I’ve had for a while, as a backup device. For the money I paid (£140) it offers a lot. A high resolution, large OLED display, good battery life, a seemingly good performing Exynos chipset (1380), 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. It also has the almost elusive feature in 2025 that is expandable storage via Micro SD card. The cameras are reasonable, and it has OIS. To top it off it comes with a 6 year update promise. For that kind of money you really can’t go wrong.
The phone has an easily unlockable bootloader, and doesn’t put many road blocks in the way of you doing so. When I was playing around with the device I rooted it, played around with multiple “Super user” apps, tried out some modules and eventually lost interest. It turns out rooting isn’t what it used to be. As I’ve detailed before Play integrity and various other methods of root detection have made having a rooted phone a game of cat and mouse. You constantly have to keep finding ways of avoiding detection, just to use the phone you purchased with your hard earned money in the way you’d like. Eventually I lost interest in pursuing this and reverted the phone to it’s stock OS, and re-locked the bootloader.
This was when I remembered the “Knox” e-fuse. I mentioned it in my post here, but the consequences had slipped my mind when I decided to root this phone. The knox status of this phone is now “0x1”, meaning warranty void and certain features of this device won’t work. Among these features are; secure folder, work profiles, enhanced device security, Samsung health, Samsung Pay, Microsoft Intune and various other Microsoft services that rely on Knox.
Will I need or want any of these features I’m now locked out of? Probably not. But I really do not like being locked out of functionality of a device I own, because I did something that the device allowed me to do. How do I know that in a couple of years time that Google will up their “play integrity” game and require knox status to be 0x0 to use banking apps? I could understand being locked out if I still had an unlocked bootloader and was running non official software, but my bootloader is locked, and the “binary version” listed by Samsung in Download mode is “Samsung official”. They know everything about my device is legitimate, otherwise the bootloader would not be locked. The knox status is simply a control tactic. It’s a permanent punishment and deterrent from using anything except Samsung’s official firmware.
If a Google pixel can have a custom ROM such as Graphene or Lineage installed, and then revert back to it’s stock ROM, with the bootloader locked again and have no long term consequences, and more importantly not void it’s warranty there is absolutely no reason Samsung can’t.
I appreciate the ability to be able to unlock the bootloader and install what I like, but having unfixable consequences as a result is unacceptable. I cannot sell this device in good conscience now, as it would negatively affect its new owner. I’m also wary of putting this device into daily use now, for myself or a family member, as who knows what functionality will be further stripped from it as Google and Samsung further lock down their devices.
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