Why so many used Pixels have OEM unlocking disabled

We've all been there: you buy a Pixel phone from eBay, Poshmark, Mercari, etc, and the goal is installing a custom OS.

Then, when you go to enable OEM unlocking, which is the first step to do so on a Pixel, it is grayed out.

You then try the usual steps to fix it, like connecting to Wi-Fi, then rebooting or running a GMS checkin, but it still doesn't work.

Why?

Customers of carriers

Carriers want people on their network as it is a recurring subscription fee. To make some people switch, carriers offer trade-in deals or discounts on the phone if you get their plan, sometimes a super expensive one.

Those phones, naturally, are locked, almost always with a contract.

Other people just buy the phone locked from a carrier and don't think too much about it.

So the seller is now a customer of a carrier.

Why carriers prevent unlocking the bootloader

Carriers prevent unlocking the bootloader simply because they don't want people to bypass the SIM lock by editing the filesystem.

Other times, it is because they don't want people messing with vendor apps in the phone.

Some carriers will let you unlock the bootloader after the phone stops having its SIM restrictions. T-Mobile is usually an example of one.

Others don't, like Verizon.

The dirty trick in the used phone market

When you go to sell your phone, you'll notice that SIM-locked phones don't have as high of a resale value as unlocked ones.

In that case, the sellers with a locked phone naturally want the unlocked price.

So sellers that think they're savvy go to the carrier and have them unlock the phone's SIM restrictions, which, of course, most likely left the OEM unlocking option grayed out.

Then they sell the phone for the price of an unlocked phone, without realizing there's 3 types of locking and not two.

For some reason, I never found an explanation online that mentioned this explicitly. But now you know why specifically.

The final explanation

This probably best explained through a POV, so here:

Here's the seller's POV: I have a Pixel that was initially locked, I now want to sell it, so I contacted the carrier and unlock its SIM. But that unlocking process often doesn't enable OEM unlocking. But I didn't know that and I sold it for the price a genuinely unlocked one does.

To the buyer's POV: I just bought a phone that takes whatever SIM and yet it doesn't have OEM unlocking as an option, and I don't know why.

How to avoid it

Many people online will tell you to ask the seller to show an image of that option and see if it is grayed out.

That's too heavy handed and many sellers won't show that image, whether they don't know what you mean or they don't want to boot up the phone.

The question you should ask and they probably would always answer is simply this:

Was the phone initially bought locked?

That will give you the same information.

What you should do if you already bought such a device

Check with the platform to see if it can be returned. If it can, then do so as you basically got scammed, although most likely not with malice.

If not, then you can sell the phone at a "middleground" price and buy a brand-new Pixel or one that was never locked.

If you bought it from a carrier, contact them or sell it at that same middleground price.