PSA: Do not lend Google Fi phones out to friends without getting their pin | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Do not lend Google Fi phones out to friends without getting their pin

6 pointsexabrial8 comments

Do not lend Google Fi phones out to friends without getting their pin!

I lent my old phone to a friend (ex) and they hard reset it before returning it to me (which is pretty normal). Unfortunately, even though I have the receipt for the purchase, the phone is in my Google Fi history, Google will not let anyone but the previous user sign into the phone. I contacted Fi support and they said there's nothing they can do (which obviously isn't true, but they'd like you to believe that).

Apparently, before you hard reset, you need to remove their Google account from the phone, put yours on, or change the pin to something you know BEFORE you hard reset. And this is not written down anywhere on their support site. Avoid the $900 paperweight!

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This is true of most modern devices I'm afraid. iPhone and Macbook can't be attached to a new iCloud account if someone still has that device attached to theirs. You have to get that person to remove the device from their account, often through an archaic web control panel.

Which I guess is exactly what they want, and what comes with an anti-consumer monopoly unfortunately. I cannot wait for these companies to get broken up.

Even without the iCloud lock you can get burnt.

I lent a friend an iPhone8 while he got his phone repaired. He factory reset it, and then forgot the pin he used to lock it afterwards.

(Fortunately he eventually "remembered" it before hitting the phone's lockout, which presumably means it was just not the important reused pin he thought he'd used, but some other important pin...)

What I find interesting is that Google will gladly buy the phone back from for 1/10 of the price, but nowhere does it say you must provide the pin or your email password. Obviously they have a way to bypass it, but will only do so if it benefits them.

It could be that they reuse those phones for parts. At 1/10th the price I’m sure you could recoup that investment with the screen alone.

They probably have some way to get recycling credit from these, and offset other areas where they're generating waste.

Yes, but at the very least, the original owner of the phone can sign in with their iCloud credentials and unlock the phone, which will allow them to also remove Find My iPhone and sign the phone out of iCloud.

Insane that they don't use Google authentication to allow you to sign into the phone beforehand.

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