Hacker News Reader

Sony is one of the few Android vendors that mainlines the device drivers for their hardware, so you can reasonably build the newest AOSP version and go to 7.1 if you feel the inclination.

View on HN

IIRC that excludes their custom camera software though, so the quality of your photos declines when you even do so much as root your phone.

How would rooting your phone (to be clear: enabling the ability to "su" to root, thus giving you full power over your system) screw your camera/image quality? I totally understand flashing 3rd Party ROMs where they can't speak to the hardware as well.

I'm not an expert, but it has something to do with rooting invalidating DRM keys. It was circumvented for the Z3C:

https://blog.al4.co.nz/2015/01/good-news-for-z3-compact-owne...

But it seems like it was a very deliberate choice by Sony.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com