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Comment by rany_ | Hacker News Reader

They've already done this for a while. It's called FRP (Factory Reset Protection). I'm pretty sure that even my Android phone from 2017 had this feature.

I don't know why they're touting it as a new feature.

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FRP is a worthless pain in the ass. It's usually trivial to bypass, it just wastes time and makes resetting phones more annoying. (I've had to do it a few times, once on a used phone I bought, and a couple of times for family members who forgot their password.)

Factory reset should be exactly that; FRP needs to die in a fire.

It sounds like this new thing is going in the opposite direction.

> It's usually trivial to bypass...

Theft protection is a friction to deter "script kiddies" equivalent of phone thieves.

It's definitely older than that. I remember implementing it at an old job. That device ran 4.4 and was later upgraded to 5. I know we had it in our 5 builds but I can't remember about the KitKat builds.

Yeah they even mention it in their help pages

> Expect to unlock your screen or enter Google Account information [after reset]

https://support.google.com/android/answer/9459346?hl=en#veri...

Frankly the only new feature I read on this announcement is the "auto-lock on sudden movement" which seems like a minor evolution of a feature they had 10 years ago that does the opposite (prevent auto-lock when the device is stationary).

> I don't know why they're touting it as a new feature.

This is powered by AI! /s

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