This article goes into more detail about how these new measures will actually work compared to the blog post earlier this year from Google. Namely:
- Enabling the OEM unlocking setting will no longer prevent FRP from activating.
- Bypassing the setup wizard will no longer deactivate FRP. FRP restrictions will apply until you verify ownership of the device by signing in.
- Adding a new Google account is blocked.
- Setting a lock screen PIN or password is blocked.
- Installing new apps is blocked.
And for those who dont install GApps…?
Still neat I guess.
Sounds like good ideas that’ll be a pain in the ass for innocent power users.
Looks like they “just” have to stop signing in with a Google account, and may have to enable adb and install apps using it / e.g. Shizuku
Until they sign back in to their own phone…? How is that a pain?
This assumes everything works fine. It’s probably an edge case, but on my Nexus 6P an update somehow messed with my encryption keys, and the screen lock pattern that I’d used for over a year stopped getting recognised. I can’t remember the solution but I vaguely remember having to factory reset. Whatever the solution was, it wasn’t too different to what a thief would do… I was bypassing the screen lock after all.
because I want to get rid of google, and not use or even have a google account anymore
If you don’t sign into a Google account, you will never arm this mechanism at all.
Then don’t buy their devices? What a novel solution.
Who’s devices? This is not a manufacturer dependent thing.
Android is useful without any google built-in software, and unfortunately it’s not affordable to avoid having a smartphone in today’s world.
If you wanted to say to not buy Android devices, all I can say is you are very ignorant. And ignorance is a lot of things but novel.I do not know if your being sarcastic, ignorant, or lazy, but there are other companies out there that produce cheap phones with operating systems other than android.
cheap phones with operating systems other than android.
Who please? All I know of are Apple, or Nothing Phone- they’re not cheap IMO.
Genuinely interested though, I’d love to deGoogle.
Since you asked nicely:
https://pine64.com/product-category/pinephone/
https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/
https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
https://www.kaiostech.com/explore/devices/
https://shop.jolla.com/details/91eb91d3-c3de-41d0-b3c0-7075a339112d/
There’s a reason iOS and Android OS both dominate the market: they do literally everything all these phones attempt to do but better in pretty much every single way, including the ability to easily de-Google ironically.
Not eveyrone has or needs a google or any system-wide account to use their phones.
And if you don’t sign into Google, the protections won’t activate, and you won’t have a problem.
I should have provided more info. I am not defending that FRPs should not exist, rather that there should be an option to utilize them without an account.
Graphene devs are considering using a random code similar to an account restoration.
That makes a lot of sense. I like the GrapheneOS approach to these things.
I hope they can figure something out that’ll be user friendly that’s also recoverable if your forget the password. Wouldn’t want to put myself in a “lost my key, guess I can never sell my phone now” situation.
I’m more focused on the adorable plushie in the hero image 🥹❤️
L tbh, if the thieves steal my phone I would rather them be able to have someone else use it than throw it away. hopefully they find a way around.
atleast they can still break it down for parts.
Nah, fuck that. I’m not rewarding somebody’s thievery, that just empowers them to do it again. I’d remote-destroy my stolen phone with thermite if I could; not to protect what’s on the phone, but so that whoever stole it has absolutely nothing to show for it.
What a silly take.
When iOS locked down devices the number of people being mugged in street robberies dropped significantly.
What you’re hoping for will just lead to more people stealing phones off people.
I love crime.
Besides, I don’t like phone motherboards turning into ewaste.
Okay, according to the article, this functionality will only activate after you have signed into a Google account for the first time on the device. So, at least for those of us who use custom software such as lineage OS, that won’t matter since we don’t put a Google account on the device to begin with in a lot of cases. A lot of us boot the phone for the first time, skip the entire setup wizard as fast as possible without signing in or any of that stuff, and then immediately enable OEM unlocking and flash the lineage or whatever software.
I also imagine FRP will be ignored by custom ROMs even if the secret data is set.
Well, that won’t matter unless it’s a brand new phone or has been properly erased because you won’t be able to install lineage anyway unless one of those two conditions are met.
The more I hear about Android 15,
the less excited I get for it…for me it’s been the same since 8. sure there are some good changes, but generally it’s forced restrictions upon more forced restrictions, and I hate it
This could still be bypassed by flashing a new OS that deliberately messes up the userdata wipe-persisting secrets. Well idk if there’s a way to prevent that, but I guess really needy and tech-savvy people could recover lost devices that way
You can’t really flash phones without unlocking the bootloader first, and you can’t unlock the bootloader without unlocking FRP
Without opening the phone up and directly accessing NAND storage, you’re not going to be able to reflash much. This makes it impossible for most thieves to abuse custom ROMs to sell stolen devices, because there’s not that much profit in stolen phones if you need to spend hours on making them work again. You might as well get a real job at that point.
Is the bootloader unlocking requirement that FRP is not triggered a hard one or just because the settings screen isn’t (or shouldn’t) be reachable? Now that OEM unlocking and FRP aren’t tied together anymore, it doesn’t seem like a hard one
“Theievs” definitely not targeting power users…
How was this not already a thing? These seem like quite basic features if you want to stop people from using stolen phones. From what I can tell online, it seems rather trivial for thieves to bypass FRP in the current incantation of the system.
I do wonder what will happen if your Google account gets banned, though. I can’t find much about it online. Some older posts suggest that only having the email address and password is enough, but these days you can log in to Google without ever entering a password, and there’s no way Google will just send your password to a new phone.
I think the reason this hasn’t been done yet is because their implementation comes with benefits like portability and low maintenance when the feature is implemented in just one app and just one part of the code. I think they hoped that patching bypasses in one app is viable and would eventually close most of the holes, but it turned out not to be so simple because bypasses emerged time and time again even with very limited initial access.
You’re not supposed to be able to skip running the wizard. A stolen phone was unusable and effectively had all of these features, but with a single point of failure that has turned out to be more of a problem then the maintenance benefit is worth.
Google is making Android worse and worse in each release.
Why exactly is this worse?
It is an optional feature that the majority of people will be using, making herd immunity for those who do not
So… I flash wrong ROM, wipe everything and install the correct one and I’m screwed? Or do I just login with my Google account?
I think you would be fine. You’re only restricted if you log into the vanilla ROM, do some stuff, and later if you want to use the vanilla ROM again you’ll be required to login to the account you used last on the vanilla ROM to make it happy with the device.
I don’t expect custom ROMs will have any compatibility with this feature. I believe they would bypass it entirely.
I guess they can skip this crap completely whatsoever
yeah great, EDL mode still is exists…
True! But it still hurts the resale value because users are likely to notice a device with broken secure boot if you were to somehow use it to forcefully flash a modified ROM.
Are you proposing this mode could be used to somehow clear the secret data?
My understanding is EDL mode can refuse to flash some partitions and some devices will not enter this mode if fastboot is working, which also enforces preventing access to some partitions. Most people who use EDL already unlocked the bootloader, but I don’t think this method works on all devices if the boot loader is still locked.
