There have been some very good news about the HTC One M9 and its S-ON status. If you have ever owned a HTC device in the past and have tried rooting and installing a custom ROM on it, you probably are familiar with the terms S-ON and S-OFF.
What are these two terms and where they differ? On every custom ROM installation guide you will notice that you need a HTC phone with S-OFF. If you have S-ON, you will not be able to install it. Basically, S-ON is a security measure on HTC devices that protects the NAND storage. This makes installing ROMs and rooting impossible since the storage is protected.
When the phone is S-ON, the security check is disabled and developers can get access to the NAND storage. Now, we have received some excellent news regarding the S-ON status on the HTC One M9. One of the developers named “jcase” has released a picture of a HTC One M9 unit, on bootloader mode with status S-OFF. This means that unlocking the One M9 has been a success.
This opens doors to further development of custom ROMs, mods and recoveries. On another note, the how to guide on how to unlock the HTC One M9 and change the status to S-OFF will not get released for a few weeks until the guide is finished.