I'd be really interested to know what happened. His post seems pretty detailed implying that he tried to unlock multiple times with no luck but was successful after using the Project Fi SIM.
Yes. Never activated on vzw but bought from them directly.
Well it seems like his was brand new and had never had a Verizon SIM in it. I wonder if that makes a difference? He said he tried the OEM unlock command and then updated to the March firmware then activated with a Google Fi SIM.
I created a thread on Reddit asking people to try it out. One person said he has a Pixel on 7.1.1 activated on Verizon currently with a locked bootloader. His wife has Project Fi so he's going to try activating with her sim and then unlocking when she gets home from work.
jcase mentioned "virgin" phone. That coupled with his claim that they connect to the google servers makes me think if this is true, you should not connect to the Verizon network before you put the Project Fi SIM in the device.
I think he mentioned trying a virgin phone just to be 100% there were no other variables coming into play when testing. At the same time it would be nice to have.someone test a new out of the box very Pixel on 7.1.1. Someone should create a test thread and make sure to mention to pull the SIM before booting and then skip connecting to wifi during setup.
He said he never activated it with a Verizon SIM in it.
Yeah, it seems like there are a few recent Verizon phones that are being shipped from the factory that haven't had the bootloader configured so that it is not unlockable. According to someone else on the Pixel forum, the OEM unlocking is grayed out even with the Google Pixels until they connect to the internet. So the SIM may not matter, these phones may have been unlockable no matter what SIM was in them initially.
On some XDA forums in the past people noticed things and then speculated what the implications of their observations might be. The speculation lead to exploits that enabled bootloader unlocking and root in some instances.
Did you try checking for updates and taking an OTA?
Yes, it got one update. I am trying to enroll in the beta program now and waiting for download and see if that works. I doubt it, but there's always hope right.
Remember when jcase said in order to find out what the trigger is we would need to reverse engineer the firmware? It can't be the sim. It's way deeper than that. He knows.
Jcase's method has nothing to do with these 2 cases, they didn't use depixel8.
Thanks for the info. It is looking like the 2 people who got Verizon Pixels without the OEM unlocking being grayed out got phones that were not flashed properly at the factory.
What I asked him was, what determines whether or not the option is grayed out. That's when he said I'd need to reverse engineer the firmware. It wasn't about depixel8.
That doesn't mean that there can't be a glitch that jcase is unaware of that allows unlocking by a different mechanism. He knows of one way, that doesn't mean there aren't other ways.
There is nothing jcase is unaware of when it comes to Android.
