DO NOT let your phone get wiped for any reason!

Life Technology
1

Exactly what it says.

In the old days you just restore from backups and you’re good, and even if you wipe your phone for any reason you can just restore everything.

But not today, I just found out.

Google and all that have these lockout protection, and if you wipe your phone it thinks you have a brand new phone and treats you like you are attempting to hack someone else’s account, I mean it!

It means you will need to have another computer, phone, or whatever around to get you back in, and fail too many times (fail means you go into one screen, click back, and try again) and you get locked out because they think you are literally trying to hack your own account.

It doesn’t end there. WeChat will stop working (if you use it for business or whatever) and you require your Wechat friend to send you a code to get it back working again, and it doesn’t always work, because the app will have a system error anyhow. Doesn’t matter if you need to use WeChat right now. You are helpless, only your friends can help you.

Google wallet will not let you add a card to your wallet, if you try it will keep giving you error messages.

Yea your online accounts are so stupid that it literally doesn’t know your phone, that got wiped for any reason, is still the same phone. It doesn’t care what the IMEI number or serial number is, it treats you as a stranger.

So in short, DO NOT let your phone get wiped for any reason, it will be the start of a long string of problems that will require you to run around in person to resolve. This goes for getting a new phone too.

Fucking security theater bullshit.

2

How does a phone get wiped unless you actively perform a factory reset?

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3

I accidentally participated in the beta program, and was unable to back out of it. When I did back out, phone is wiped and you can’t even login to your google account, let alone restore backups.

Backups are meaningless anyways.

4

I don’t know what all this means. About wiping.

If I lose my phone or it drops into the toilet, I just buy a new phone, log in, and my new phone looks just like my old phone with all the same content and everything.

I lost enough phones.

2 Likes
5

I also don’t really get what you’re talking about here.

I don’t know why you’d wipe your phone without making sure everything was backed up and retrievable, for example.

6

It depends.

You first gotta login to your google account first, and you need a device already logged into your google account standing by for this to work.

Also stuff like WeChat (this is the worst) won’t recognize your device at all and must get a friend to send you WeChat with a code and hopefully this will unlock you. Otherwise, you’re locked out of WeChat.

What I’m saying is, more and more apps and services all have protections, and your new devices are treated like a foreign invader unless you have a second device or a friend to unlock you.

I guess this is why people have multiple phones…

7

I’m not sure if this is true (I don’t remember it being an issue at all when switching phones a few months back), but if it is, so what? You can just log in to your Google account on a computer, surely?

This is an app-specific problem and there probably aren’t too many people here using WeChat, but also I didn’t have any issue transferring WeChat over to my new phone. I remember this security feature being mildly annoying in the past, but you can just get someone to send you the code and it’s sorted.

I guess it’s not.

What was the problem with the beta program anyway? Even if you did sign up accidentally, was there a reason not just to continue with it? And doesn’t it warn you about wiping your phone?

8

Yikes, I stopped participating when they announced you can’t stop midway through. That and many banking and Google wallet apps wouldn’t work in beta.

Most of the above can be mitigated if having alternative device that also has the login information. But, some apps like 2fa can’t be recovered. Losing phone or having wiped would suck for that.

1 Like
9

I think this is something unique to this account or phone or something.

I know quite a few people in the tech support industry and my company has an internal chat where they frequently vent about the stupid product design decisions they run into on a daily basis, (mostly in O365 lately, lol), as well as bizarre end user situations (phone falls in ocean etc) and I’ve never heard anyone mention this kind of thing. :thinking:

That said, even if it’s a vanishingly rare case, I suppose it may be something to keep in mind? :man_shrugging:

(I’ll mention it to some folks and see what they come back with!)

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10

why participate in any beta run?
you’re that tech company’s guinea pig and like TL lose stuff or get locked out.

11

On iPhones, if you wipe your phone without first disabling “Find My iPhone” with your password, then it will treat you like you just stole that phone.

You can certainly wipe your phone and get all your data back, and get back into all your accounts. You just need to follow the proper procedures. For some accounts, the procedures are more complicated than others.

12

For future reference, you can add multi factor authentication like SMS codes or use an authenticator app for those one time passcodes.

I mess with my phone often and have had issues logging into a secondary testing account for the same reasons you’re talking about. Never had issues after using an authenticator app.

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13

your imei and serial number is (or should be) masked from online accounts for security.

:laughing: how do you accidentally do that?

Yeah, they warn you left and right it wipes your phone.

And of course, you can access your accounts and backups. If you don’t have 2 step auth turned on relying on your phone, or your prepped with other ways to access your phone, that are available to setup and are mentioned when you turn on 2 step.

It sounds like he had 2 step authentication turned on. usine his phone to authenticate. that he then wiped, with no backup way to authenticate, which you can set up.

14

I did gmail beta back in the day

15

There’s all kinds of reasons, perhaps to get a sneak peek at what’s getting offered.

What happened is I lost a lot of features with android 14 beta, for example I completely lost the ability to upload images to forumosa . Pushing the image upload button does nothing.

16

I was not required to do this when I got a new phone a few weeks ago. I simply logged into my google account when setting up the new phone. All my content from old phone was saved. Images go to google drive. I did not need log into another device that had my google account on it. All I needed was sms verification to my phone number.

17

I had to go back home and use my computer logged into Gmail to unblock my phone, otherwise it was effectively bricked.

Sim card or sms verification would have been sufficient.

18

sms verification is a backup option in Google 2 step verification.

19

Were you doing this without a sim card? :thinking:

And apparently also without any other computing device available to you at the time of the reset? :expressionless:

20

I have another problem with contactless payment.

I’m not able to add any cards to google wallet at all. Like it would be all fine, contact the bank, and I would be presented with legalese that I would agree to, then I would get an error saying Unable to add this card, try another card or try again later. Except it wouldn’t work. I had actually had the same error on my phone when I first got it and I was able to succeed by deleting the card from my Google payment, and it would add, but now when I tried the same trick it didn’t work, and not only that I triggered some kind of a lock.

I saw a thread on reddit about the same issue and it seems neither google nor the banks know what’s going on in their back ends, but after waiting a while it would mysteriously work.

Is google pay my only choice, can I use apple pay or Samsung pay?

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This is fecking annoying and I can’t use line pay on most places including 711 and familymart because they restrict to certain banks but not contactless payment?

Sometimes I wish I can just write checks…

I’ve tried different cards and same thing.