The great Windows Phone homebrew experiment has ended, ChevronWP7 phones will now start re-locking today

More than a year ago, in an unprecedented move, Microsoft embraced the homebrew hacking community by blessing the ChevronWP7 team with an officially sanctioned and relatively cheap (but not free) developer unlock service.

This move was widely lauded, and saw around 10,000 unlock codes sold for $9 each.

Unfortunately the ChevronWP7 team became tired of administering the service, and stopped selling tokens early in the year, and ultimately shuttered the service in April 2012.

Phones will now start relocking when connected to the desktop via the Zune client.

Working with Microsoft the team did manage to get 1 year’s free App Hub membership for those who purchased ChevronWP7 unlock, but this was of course far from the life-long unlock which was promised earlier. U

The bigger picture however is that there is now no Microsoft-approved way to unlock your Windows Phone without giving the company a massive amount of details about yourself by registering with App Hub, making it fair to say Windows Phone is once again as locked down as iOS for those who just want to lift the hood on their new smartphone and “unleash the potential”.

Read more about the ChevronWP7 process here.