Not with AT&T. Bought a Pixel 9 Pro Fold on a huge sale from Google themselves, but because AT&T doesn’t sell it, they couldn’t provision it correctly on their network. Went through all the troubleshooting, they sent me a new SIM even. Finally I did my own research online, found a reddit post where someone talked to an employee on some internal AT&T team that said they probably won’t ever support it properly since they don’t sell it.
Oh that’s gross as shit. Seems they have a general BYOD plan, but I guess that only applies if they have that model of phone.
Didn’t even realize that could be an issue, given I’ve used a PinePhone of all things on my carrier and it worked as fine as one could expect mobile Linux to work
Yeah, their BYOD plan works great if they sell the phone you’re using. My Pixel 7 I got from the Google Store worked just fine with AT&T for two years before I upgraded. I just didn’t even consider whether they sold the device or not to be important to the functionality of the phone.
This is, conveniently, a decision that discourages their customers from buying hardware from anywhere but themselves an anti-competitive practice which carries little risk of lawsuit, or fine.
It’s certainly not a technical problem. We all, mostly, use the same cellular network and other carriers have no trouble supporting devices purchased directly from the vendor.
Not with AT&T. Bought a Pixel 9 Pro Fold on a huge sale from Google themselves, but because AT&T doesn’t sell it, they couldn’t provision it correctly on their network. Went through all the troubleshooting, they sent me a new SIM even. Finally I did my own research online, found a reddit post where someone talked to an employee on some internal AT&T team that said they probably won’t ever support it properly since they don’t sell it.
So that was frustrating.
Oh that’s gross as shit. Seems they have a general BYOD plan, but I guess that only applies if they have that model of phone.
Didn’t even realize that could be an issue, given I’ve used a PinePhone of all things on my carrier and it worked as fine as one could expect mobile Linux to work
Yeah, their BYOD plan works great if they sell the phone you’re using. My Pixel 7 I got from the Google Store worked just fine with AT&T for two years before I upgraded. I just didn’t even consider whether they sold the device or not to be important to the functionality of the phone.
Anything can be an issue if work hard enough.
This is, conveniently, a decision that discourages their customers from buying hardware from anywhere but themselves an anti-competitive practice which carries little risk of lawsuit, or fine.
It’s certainly not a technical problem. We all, mostly, use the same cellular network and other carriers have no trouble supporting devices purchased directly from the vendor.