Installing new ROMs can be an excellent way to breathe new life into an unsupported old handset, but leaping through all the rooting and recovery hoops can be a turn-off for many. Fortunately, Sony is helping to make installing custom operating systems a little easier, by releasing a set of special bootloaders that enable booting from the recovery partition. An essential requirement for installing and booting into another OS.

What this means is that users will be more free to install custom ROMs and even other operating systems, as developers don’t have to spend time modifying the Android build system to pack a recovery in with the boot image. By allowing for the the use of regular recovery images built on any AOSP based project, users will even be able to install other Android related operating systems, such as Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch, to their phone.

The first Sony devices to receive the new bootloaders are the ARM Cortex-A7 CPU based Xperia T2 Ultra, Xperia T3, Xperia M2, and Xperia E3, with the potential for more devices to appear in the future. Sony hasn’t made an official announcement yet, but you can already download the bootloaders using Sony’s official flash-tool. Just plug in your device and select the “(open devices) bootloader” service. Additional instructions can be found in the source link below.

It’s not clear if or when Sony will be rolling out this feature to its higher end devices, but it’s a promising sign for those who like to modify their OS experience. We can only hope that Sony’s headstart will convince some other OEMs to include similar options in the future too.