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Factory Reset Protection on Samsung Galaxy S23

T

tmcclain73

Lurker
I’m considering buying a Samsung Galaxy S23. This may sound like a weird question but is it possible to set up the Factory Reset Protection so that the user is not able to change the settings and bypass FRP? It seems like FRP is mainly an anti theft feature not so much a parental control or accountability feature.

To give some clarity/background to my question…I tend to spend way too much time online when I should IE go to bed. I’ve been known to reset my iPhone to factory settings to bypass the screen time controls set up by a friend to help keep me focused. The S23 seems like a good option and I also miss my S5 I had a while back. Yes I am aware of flips phones, therapy…etc. I’m looking into those and other options as well.

Any info you have would be greatly appreciated.
 
Short answer: no. FRP is not "mainly" an anti-theft feature, that is all that it is. Its only function is to prevent a thief resetting a locked phone (to get past a screen lock) and then using that phone as their own or selling it. If you know your Google account name and password there's no "bypassing" needed: you can reset without worrying about FRP, then enter the credentials and you are back in. Conversely if you don't know those details (I'm always amazed by how many people say they don't) then if you reset without removing the account first you will be locked out completely (which will solve your screen time problem, at least until you buy a new phone, but isn't what you want...).

In short, FRP is not what you are looking for. It has no ability to prevent someone resetting a phone, all it does is prevent an unauthorised (or forgetful) person from using it afterwards.

The problem is that nothing you do in Android (no app, no settings, nothing) can stop you resetting a phone because you don't need to be running Android to do that, you can do it from recovery mode. So the only thing I can think of is:

1) Get your friend to set up whatever screen time restrictions, and also to use whatever parental controls are needed to prevent you removing those restrictions.
2) Also they need to lock part or all of your system settings, so that you can't do anything to bypass FRP (e.g. remove the google account and then reset the phone).
3) Then get them to change your Google password so that you don't know it.

This won't stop you resetting the phone. But if you do reset it FRP will prevent you using it again until your friend unlocks it, which means you will be locked out for longer than the screen controls would have done (and hence makes resetting it pointless).

Obviously you have to trust your friend, because they will have full access to your account. And this would have other consequences: you'd probably be prevented from changing other system settings that you might want to, and you would not be able to log into your Google account on any other device (e.g. a computer). But the only way I can see to stop you from doing this if you choose to do so is to make the anti-theft system treat you like a thief, i.e. someone who is not authorised to log in again after a reset, which of necessity means someone who cannot log into the phone's Google account.
 
Yes I do trust my friend and I do know all my Google usernames and passwords lol! It would be helpful to know that I would have to go to my friend to have access to my phone again. It would be quite a deterrent to resetting my phone. And I definitely don’t want to be locked out of my phone until the next time I can meet up with him.

However, if he changes the password to my Google account it sounds like that may affect other things tied to that account like my YouTubeTV or Gmail…etc. This still might be doable. Thank for the info.
 
Yes, if you log into anything Google using that account on any other device then not knowing your password becomes a big problem!

But I really can't think of anything else, or at least anything else that would actually prevent someone from doing a reset (I had an idea, but it has a lot of serious, permanent, unfixable negative consequences, and if I told you how to do it I'd also be telling you how you could still do a reset afterwards, which makes it completely pointless!).
 
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